Karl Marx

Expelled from Prussia, then France, then Belgium, Marx settled in London in 1849 and spent thirty years in the reading room of the British Museum writing "Capital". His family lived on money from Engels and pawned the household silver; three of his children died young in Soho lodgings.

Eleven people came to his funeral. The large monument that stands there now was put up in 1956, and the original grave was a plain one some way off.