During William Blake's career as a poet, he spent the majority of his life in this town of Soho, England. This drawing shows the depiction of Soho, England around the year 1700 and it's detrimental to understanding Blake's Songs of Innocence. When Blake writes about the chimney sweeps and the children of London, he's drawing from a first-hand experience, as Soho was one of the most industrious cities in Britain at the time. This is what a typical housing area in Soho looked like, with chimneys lining every single building, billowing smoke. In Blake's The Chimney Sweep, the young apprentices who risked their lives cleaning chimneys were probably brought to homes such as these and forced to climb throughout the entire complex's furnace system, cleaning out soot and ash and exiting from the top of the chimney.