Bounded by Regent Street to the west, Oxford Street to the north and Charing Cross Road to the east, Soho is very much the heart of the West End. It was the city’s premier red-light district for centuries and retains an unorthodox and slightly raffish air that’s unique for central London. It has an immigrant history as rich as that of the East End and a louche nightlife that has attracted writers and revellers of every sexual persuasion since the eighteenth century. Conventional sights in Soho are few and far between, yet there’s probably more street life here than anywhere else in the city centre. Most folk head to Soho to go to the cinema or theatre, and to have a drink or a bite to eat in the innumerable bars, cafés and restaurants that pepper the tiny area and Fitzrovia, the quieter Soho spillover, north of Oxford Street.
Soho
Soho’s historic reputation for tolerance made it an obvious place of refuge from dour, postwar Britain. Jazz and skiffle proliferated in the 1950s, folk and rock in the 1960s, and punk at the end of the 1970s. London’s artistic (and alcoholic) cliques still gather here and the media, film and advertising industries have a strong presence. The area’s most recent transformation has seen it become London’s most high-profile gay quarter, especially around Old Compton Street. The attraction, though, remains in the unique mix of people who drift through Soho. There’s nowhere else in the city where such diverse slices of London come face to face: businessmen, drunks, theatregoers, fashion victims, market-stallholders, pimps, prostitutes and politicians. Take it all in, and enjoy – for better or worse, most of London is not like this.
SOHO’S WHO’S WHO
When Soho – named after the cry that resounded through the district when it was a popular place for hunting hares – was built over in the seventeenth century, its streets were among the most sought-after addresses in the capital. Princes, dukes and earls built their mansions around Soho and Leicester squares, which became the centre of high-society nightlife, epitomized by the wild masquerades organized by Viennese prima donna Theresa Cornelys (who had a daughter by Casanova), which drew “a riotous assembly of fashionable people of both sexes”, a traffic jam of hackney carriages and a huge crowd of onlookers. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the party was over, the rich moved west, and Soho began its inexorable descent into poverty and overcrowding. Even before the last aristocrats left, Soho had become one of the city’s main dumping grounds for immigrants. French Huguenots were followed by Italians, Irish, Jews and eventually the Chinese.
For several centuries, Soho has also been a favourite haunt of the capital’s creative bohos, literati and rebels. It was at Soho’s Turk’s Head coffee shop, in 1764, that Joshua Reynolds founded “The Club”, to give Dr Johnson unlimited opportunities for talking. Thomas de Quincey turned up in 1802, and was saved from starvation by a local prostitute, an incident later recalled in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Wagner arrived destitute in 1839, Marx lived in poverty here after the failure of the 1848 revolution, and Rimbaud and Verlaine pitched up after the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871. “Such noise and chaos. Such magnificent and terrible abandon. It’s like stepping into the future”, wrote Verlaine.
Leicester Square
A short hop east of Piccadilly Circus, most Londoners tend to avoid Leicester Square unless they’re heading for one of the cinemas. In the eighteenth century, this fairly pleasant leafy square was home to the fashionable “Leicester House set”, headed by successive Hanoverian princes of Wales who didn’t get on with their fathers at St James’s. Busts of celebrities from those days can be found in the gardens, though most people are more impressed by the statues of Shakespeare and Charlie Chaplin. By night – and especially at weekends – Leicester Square resembles city centres across the country, a playground for the drunk and underdressed.
The square has been an entertainment zone since the mid-nineteenth century, when it boasted Turkish baths and music halls such as the grandiose Empire, now a cinema that’s a favourite for red-carpet premieres and, close by, the Hippodrome – designed by Frank Matcham in 1900 – now the UK’s biggest casino. Purpose-built movie houses moved in during the 1930s, a golden age evoked by the sleek black lines of the Odeon on the east side, and maintain their grip on the area.
THE SWISS CORNER
For no particularly good reason, the area in the northwest corner of Leicester Square has a Swiss theme to it. The impetus was the building of the Swiss Centre – a sort of trade centre-cum-tourist office – in 1968 and the renaming of the area as Swiss Court. After forty years of alpine theming, the much unloved Swiss Centre was finally demolished in 2008, leaving behind a slightly surreal Swiss glockenspiel. This tall steel structure is topped by a Swiss railway clock and features a glass drum decorated with the 26 cantonal flags which lower on the hour (Mon–Fri noon & 5–8pm, Sat & Sun 2–4pm), to sound a 27-bell carillon, thus revealing a procession of Helvetic cows and peasants making their way up the mountain.
Notre-Dame de France
5 Leicester Place • Mon–Fri noon–6pm, Sun 10am–6pm • Free • 
020 7437 9363, 
ndfchurch.org • _test777
Leicester Square
One little-known sight, north of Leicester Square, is the modern Catholic church of Notre-Dame de France, heralded by an entrance flanked by two pillars decorated with biblical reliefs. The main point of interest within the unusual circular interior is the Chapelle de la Vierge Marie, which contains a series of simple frescoes of the Annunciation, Crucifixion and Assumption by Jean Cocteau from 1960 and an altar mosaic of the Nativity by Boris Anrep (originally covered by a new panel by Cocteau much to Anrep’s annoyance).
Chinatown
Hemmed in between Leicester Square and Shaftesbury Avenue, Chinatown’s self-contained jumble of shops, cafés and restaurants makes up one of London’s most distinct ethnic enclaves. Only a minority of the capital’s Chinese live in the three small blocks of Chinatown, with its ersatz touches – telephone kiosks rigged out as pagodas and formal entrances or paifang – yet the area remains a focus for the community, a place to do business or the weekly shopping, celebrate a wedding or just meet up on Sundays for dim sum. Most Londoners come to Chinatown simply to eat, but if the mood takes you, you can easily while away several hours sorting through the Chinese trinkets, ceramics and ornaments in the various arts and crafts shops, or amassing the perfect ingredients for a demon stir-fry.
The first Chinese immigrants were sailors who arrived here from the late eighteenth century onwards on the ships of the East India Company. London’s first Chinatown grew up around the docks at Limehouse and eventually boasted over thirty Chinese shops and restaurants. Predominantly male, this closed community achieved a quasi-mythical status in Edwardian minds as a hotbed of criminal dives and opium dens, a reputation exploited in Sax Rohmer’s novels (later made into films) featuring the evil Doctor Fu Manchu. Wartime bomb damage, postwar demolition and protectionist union laws all but destroyed Limehouse Chinatown. However, following the Communist takeover in China, a new wave of Chinese refugees began to buy up cheap property around Gerrard Street, eventually establishing the nucleus of today’s Chinatown.
Charing Cross Road
Created in the 1880s as part of the Victorians’ slum clearance drive, Charing Cross Road has historically always been liberally peppered with bookshops. One of the first to open here, in 1906, was Foyles, a vast book emporium, now at nos. 107–109, where Éamon de Valera, George Bernard Shaw, Walt Disney and Arthur Conan Doyle were all once regular customers. Once famous for its antiquated system for selling books that required customers to queue three times, it’s now a much more vibrant place, with a busy café and regular live jazz and classical music gigs.
Two of the nicest places for secondhand-book browsing are Cecil Court and St Martin’s Court, connecting the southern end of Charing Cross Road and St Martin’s Lane. These short, civilized, late-Victorian paved alleys boast specialist bookshops, such as the Italian Bookshop and Watkins Books, home of the occult, plus various antiquarian dealers selling modern first editions, old theatre posters, coins and notes, cigarette cards, maps and children’s books.
HIDDEN GEMS: QUINTESSENTIAL SOHO
Coliseum
St Martin’s Lane • 020 7845 9300, eno.org • _test777 Leicester Square or Charing Cross
At the southern end of St Martin’s Lane stands the Coliseum, an extravagant variety theatre built in 1904 by Frank Matcham, where the likes of Lillie Langtry, Sarah Bernhardt and the Ballets Russes all performed. Now home to the English National Opera, it remains London’s largest theatre, its cutest feature the revolving illuminated globe that crowns the building.
Shaftesbury Avenue
Sweeping through the southern part of Soho, the gentle curve of Shaftesbury Avenue is the heart of the West End’s Theatreland, with theatres and cinemas along its entire length. Built in the 1870s, ostensibly to relieve traffic congestion but with the dual purpose of destroying the slums that lay in its path, the street was ironically named after Lord Shaftesbury, whose life had been spent trying to help the likes of those dispossessed by the road. The most impressive theatre architecturally is the grandiose terracotta Palace Theatre, overlooking Cambridge Circus, which opened in 1891 as the Royal English Opera House; it folded after just one year, and, since the 1920s, has mostly hosted musicals. Just off Cambridge Circus, hidden away down West Street, is St Martin’s Theatre, where Agatha Christie’s record-breaking murder-mystery The Mousetrap has been on nonstop since 1952, notching up over 24,000 performances.
Old Compton Street
If Soho had an official main drag, it would be Old Compton Street, which runs parallel with Shaftesbury Avenue, and forms the heart of Central Soho. The shops, boutiques and cafés in the narrow surrounding streets are typical of the area and a good barometer of the latest Soho fads. Several places have survived the vicissitudes of fashion, including the original Patisserie Valerie, opened by the Belgian-born Madame Valerie in 1926, the Algerian Coffee Store, the Italian deli, I Camisa & Son, The Vintage House off-licence, and Gerry’s, whose spirit-window display is a paean to alcohol.
The liberal atmosphere of Soho has made it a permanent fixture on the gay scene since the last century: gay servicemen frequented the Golden Lion, on Dean Street, from World War II until the end of National Service, while a succession of gay artists found refuge here during the 1950s and 1960s. Nowadays the scene is much more upfront, with every type of gay business jostling for position on and off Old Compton Street.
SOHO ON RECORD
Soho has been a popular meeting point for the capital’s up-and-coming pop stars since the late 1950s, when the likes of Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele and Adam Faith used to hang out at the 2 i’s coffee bar, 59 Old Compton St, and perform at the rock’n’roll club in the basement. Marc Bolan, whose parents ran a market stall on Berwick Street, also worked at the café in the early 1960s. The Rolling Stones first met in a pub on Broadwick Street in early 1962 and, by the mid-1960s, were playing Soho’s premier rock venue, the Marquee, originally at 90 Wardour St. David Bowie performed there (as David Jones) in 1965, Pink Floyd played their “Spontaneous Underground” sessions the following year, Led Zeppelin had their first London gig there in 1968 and Phil Collins worked for some time as a cloakroom attendant.
In November 1975, The Sex Pistols played their first gig at St Martin’s School of Art (now Foyles) on Charing Cross Road, during which Sid Vicious (in the audience, and not the band, at the time) made his contribution to dance history when he began to “pogo”. The classic punk venue, however, was the 100 Club on Oxford Street, where the Pistols, The Clash, Siouxsie, The Damned and The Vibrators all played. The Pistols used to rehearse in the studios on Denmark Street, London’s own version of New York’s Tin Pan Alley, off Charing Cross Road (still lined with music shops). The Rolling Stones, The Kinks and Genesis all recorded songs there, and Elton John got his first job at one of the street’s music publishers in 1963. There’s a whiff of Soho’s pop music past still in Berwick Street, where a cluster of independent and secondhand record shops survive on either side of the market.
Greek Street
The streets off Old Compton Street are lined with Soho institutions past and present, starting in the east with Greek Street, named after the Greek church that once stood nearby. South of Old Compton Street, at no. 29, stands Maison Bertaux, London’s oldest French patisserie, founded in 1871. The Coach and Horses, one door down at no. 29, was lorded over for years by the boozy gang of writer Jeffrey Bernard, painter Francis Bacon and jazz man George Melly, as well as the staff of the satirical magazine, Private Eye.
Frith Street
Frith Street is home to Ronnie Scott’s, London’s longest-running jazz club, founded in 1958 and still pulling in the big names. Opposite is Bar Italia, a tiny, quintessentially Italian café established in 1949, whose late-night hours make it a clubbers’ favourite. It was in this building, appropriately enough for such a media-saturated area, that John Logie Baird made the world’s first public television transmission in 1926. Next door, a plaque recalls that the 7-year-old Mozart stayed here in 1763, having wowed George III and London society.
Soho Square
Soho Square is one of the few patches of green amid the neighbourhood’s labyrinth of streets and alleys. It began life as a smart address, surrounded by the houses of the nobility and centred on an elaborate fountain topped by a statue of Charles II. Charles survives, if a little worse for wear, on one of the pathways, but the fountain is now an octagonal, mock-Tudor garden shed. As for the buildings around the square, they are a typical Soho mix: 20th Century-Fox; the Victorian Hospital for Sick Women (now a walk-in health centre); Paul McCartney’s discreet corporate headquarters, MPL; and the British Board of Film Classification (the national guardians of film censorship).
There are also two square red-brick churches. The most prominent is the Italianate St Patrick’s, on the east side of the square, first consecrated in 1792 and thus the first Catholic church built in England after the Reformation; the current building dates from the 1890s and serves the Irish, Italian and Chinese communities. Concealed on the north side of the square, the Église Protestante, also from the 1890s, is the sole survivor of London’s once numerous Huguenot churches; the 1950 tympanum relief depicts the French refugees crossing the Channel and being granted asylum by Edward VI.
Dean Street
One block west of Frith Street runs Dean Street, once home to The Colony Room, a private drinking club that was at the heart of Soho’s postwar bohemian scene, and still home to the members-only Groucho Club, at no. 45, where today’s literati and media types preen themselves. Nearby, at no. 49, The French House is an open-to-all bohemian landmark, where the most popular drink is Ricard, and they only serve beer in halves. Opened by a German as the York Minster pub, it was bought by a Belgian, Victor Berlemont, in 1914, when the German owner was deported, and transformed into a French émigré haunt. Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan were both regulars, and during World War II it was frequented by de Gaulle and the Free French forces.
Soho’s most famous Jewish immigrant was Karl
Marx, who in 1850 moved into two “evil, frightful rooms” on the
top floor of no. 28, with his wife and maid (both of whom were pregnant by
him) and four children, having been evicted from his first two addresses for
failing to pay the rent. There’s a plaque commemorating his stay (with
incorrect dates), and the waiters at Quo Vadis
restaurant below will show diners round the rooms on request ( 020
7437 9585).
Wardour Street
A kind of dividing line between the busier eastern half of Soho and the marginally quieter western zone, Wardour Street is largely given over to the media industry. Just north of Shaftesbury Avenue, there’s a small park laid out on what used to be St Anne’s Church, bombed in the last war, with only its tower now standing – the ashes of Dorothy L. Sayers, who was a churchwarden for many years, are buried under the tower.
Brewer Street
West of Wardour Street, along Brewer Street, the sex industry has a long history and retains a foothold. It was at the Windmill Theatre, on nearby Great Windmill Street, that the famous “Revuedeville” shows, featuring static nude performers (movement was strictly forbidden by the censor), were first staged in the 1930s. The shows continued pretty much uninterrupted right through World War II – the subject of the 2005 film Mrs Henderson Presents – eventually closing in 1964. Meanwhile, back on Brewer Street, the Raymond Revuebar opened in 1952 as a “World Centre of Erotic Entertainment”, finally succumbing, in 2004, to competition from the slick lap-dancing clubs that now prevail.
SOHO VICE
Prostitution is nothing new to Soho. Way back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, prince and prole alike used to come here (and to Covent Garden) for paid sex. Several prominent courtesans were residents of Soho, their profession recorded as “player and mistress to several persons”, or, lower down on the social scale, “generally slut and drunkard; occasionally whore and thief”. Hooper’s Hotel, a high-class Soho brothel frequented by the Prince of Wales, even got a mention in the popular, late eighteenth-century book The Mysteries of Flagellation. By Victorian times, the area was described as “a reeking home of filthy vice”, where “the grosser immorality flourishes unabashed from every age downwards to mere children”. And it was in Soho that Prime Minister Gladstone used to conduct his crusade to save prostitutes – managing “to combine his missionary meddling with a keen appreciation of a pretty face”, as one perceptive critic observed.
By World War II, organized gangs, like the notorious Messina Brothers from Malta, controlled a huge vice empire in Soho, later taken over by one of their erstwhile henchmen, Bernie Silver, Soho’s self-styled “Godfather”. In the 1960s and 1970s, the sex trade threatened to take over the whole of Soho, aided and abetted by the police themselves, who were involved in a massive protection racket. The complicity between the gangs and the police was finally exposed in 1976, when ten top-ranking Scotland Yard officers were charged with bribery and corruption on a massive scale and sentenced to prison for up to twelve years. (Silver himself had been put inside in 1974.) The combined efforts of the Soho Society and Westminster Council has enormously reduced the number of sex establishments, but, with the rise of the lap-dancing club, the area’s vice days are not quite over yet.
Berwick Street
• berwickstreetlondon.co.uk • _test777 Piccadilly Circus
Pop down Walker’s Court, off Brewer Street, past the triple-X-rated film shops, and you come out into Berwick Street where the unlikely sight of one of the capital’s traditional fruit and veg markets greets you. The street itself is no beauty spot but the barrow displays are works of art in themselves. On either side, and round the corner in Broadwick Street, you’ll find some of London’s best specialist record shops like Sister Ray and Reckless Records.
Broadwick Street
It was a water pump on Broadwick Street that caused the deaths of some five hundred Soho residents in the cholera epidemic of 1854. Dr John Snow, Queen Victoria’s obstetrician, traced the outbreak to the pump, thereby proving that the disease was waterborne rather than airborne, as previously thought. No one believed him, however, until he removed the pump handle and effectively stopped the epidemic. The original pump stood outside the pub now called the John Snow, on which there’s a commemorative plaque and an easily missed red-granite kerbstone.
ART AND HERESY IN SOHO
The streets around Poland Street have more than their fair share of artistic and heretical associations. A blue plaque at 74 Broadwick St records that William Blake was born there in 1757, above his father’s hosiery shop, and where, from the age of 9, he had visions of “messengers from heaven, daily and nightly”. He opened a print shop of his own next door to the family home, and later moved nearby to 28 Poland St, where he lived six years with his “beloved Kate” and wrote perhaps his most profound work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, among other poems. Poland Street was also Shelley’s first halt after having been kicked out of Oxford in 1811 for distributing The Necessity of Atheism, and Canaletto ran a studio just south on Beak Street for a couple of years while he sat out the Seven Years’ War in exile in London. And it was in the Old King’s Arms pub on Poland Street in 1781 that the Ancient Order of Druids was revived.
Carnaby Street
Until the 1950s, Carnaby Street was a backstreet on Soho’s western fringe, occupied, for the most part, by sweatshop tailors who made up the suits for nearby Savile Row in Mayfair. Then, in 1954, Bill Green opened a shop in neighbouring Newburgh Street, selling outrageous clothes to the gay men who were hanging out at the local baths. He was followed by John Stephen, a Glaswegian grocer’s son, who opened His Clothes in Beak Street. In 1960, Stephen moved his operation to Carnaby Street and within a couple of years owned a string of trendy boutiques catering for the new market in flamboyant men’s clothing, including the wonderfully named I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet. By 1964 – the year of the official birth of the Carnaby Street myth – Mods, West Indian Rude Boys and other “switched-on people”, as the Daily Telegraph noted, had begun to hang out in Carnaby Street. By the time Mary Quant sold her first miniskirt here, the area had become the heart of London’s Swinging Sixties, its street sign the capital’s most popular postcard. A victim of its own hype, Carnaby Street quickly declined into an avenue of overpriced tack. Nowadays, it’s pedestrianized and smart again, but dominated by chains – for any sign of contemporary London fashion, you need to go round the corner to Fouberts Place, Newburgh Street and Kingly Court or head over to East London.
Photographers’ Gallery
16–18 Ramillies St • Mon–Sat 10am–6pm, Thurs till 8pm, Sun
11.30am–6pm • Free • 020 7087 9300, thephotographersgallery.org.uk • _test777 Oxford Circus
Established in 1971, the Photographers’ Gallery was the first independent gallery devoted to photography in London, and is now the city’s largest public photographic gallery. This former warehouse hosts three floors of exhibitions that change regularly and are invariably worth a visit, as are the bookshop and café. There’s also a camera obscura on the third floor (Fri–Sun 11am–1pm).
Fitzrovia
Fitzrovia is the very much quieter northern extension of Soho, beyond Oxford Street. Like its neighbour, it has a raffish, cosmopolitan history, attracting its fair share of writers and bohemians over the last hundred years or so, including the Pre-Raphaelites and members of the Bloomsbury Group. That said, it’s a lot less edgy than Soho, with just two real sights to visit – an ornate Victorian church on Margaret Street and Pollock’s Toy Museum – and one unavoidable landmark, the former Post Office Tower.
All Saints, Margaret Street
Margaret St • Mon–Sat 7.30am–7pm, Sun 8am–7.30pm • allsaintsmargaretstreet.org.uk • _test777 Oxford Circus
Few London churches are as atmospheric as All Saints, Margaret Street, built by William Butterfield in the 1850s. Patterned brickwork characterizes the entire ensemble of clergy house, choir school (Laurence Olivier sang here as a boy) and church, set around a small courtyard entered from the street through a pointed arch. The church interior – one of London’s gloomiest – is best visited on a sunny afternoon when the light pours in through the west window, illuminating the fantastic polychrome marble and stone which decorates the place from floor to ceiling. Several of the walls are also adorned with Pre-Raphaelite Minton-tile paintings, the east window is a neo-Byzantine quasi-iconostasis with saintly images nestling in gilded niches, and the elaborate pulpit is like the entire church in miniature. Surrounded by such iconographical clutter, you would be forgiven for thinking you were in a Catholic church – but then that was the whole idea of the Victorian High Church movement, which sought to re-Catholicize the Church of England without actually returning it to the Roman fold.
Charlotte Street
Fitzrovia’s main street, Charlotte Street is lined with lively cafés and restaurants, but its real heyday was in the 1930s, when it was home to the Tour Eiffel, where Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound launched the Vorticist magazine Blast. L’Étoile, further up, was patronized by the likes of Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot, while Bertorelli’s was where Eliot, John Berger and Christopher Isherwood used to meet at the Wednesday Club in the 1950s. The same crowd would get plastered in the nearby Fitzroy Tavern – from which the area got its sobriquet – along with rather more outrageous bohemians, like the hard-drinking Nina Hamnett, the self-styled “Queen of Bohemia”, who used to boast that Modigliani once told her she had the best tits in Europe.
Pollock’s Toy Museum
1 Scala St • Mon–Sat 10am–5pm • £3 • 020 7636 3452, pollockstoymuseum.com • _test777 Goodge Street
Housed above a wonderful toy shop in the backstreets of Fitzrovia is the highly atmospheric, doll’s-house-like Pollock’s Toy Museum. Its collections include a fine example of the Victorian paper theatres popularized by Benjamin Pollock, who sold them under the slogan “a penny plain, two pence coloured”. The other exhibits range from vintage teddy bears to Sooty and Sweep, and from Red Army soldiers to wax dolls, filling every nook and cranny of the museum’s six tiny, rickety rooms and the stairs – be sure to look out for the dalmatian, Dismal Desmond.
Post Office Tower
Exploring Fitzrovia, it’s impossible to ignore the looming presence of the former Post Office Tower (officially known as the BT Tower), a glass-clad pylon on Cleveland Street, designed in the early 1960s by a team of bureaucrats in the Ministry of Works. The city’s tallest building until the NatWest Tower (now Tower 42) topped it in 1981, it’s still a prominent landmark north of the river. Sadly, after a bomb attack in 1971, the tower closed to the public, and the revolving restaurant followed in 1980.
Fitzroy Square
Near the top of Fitzroy Street is Fitzroy Square, a Bloomsbury-style square begun by the Adam brothers in the 1790s and faced, initially, with light Portland stone, rather than the ubiquitous dark Georgian brickwork, but completed in stucco, some forty years later. Traffic is excluded, but few pedestrians come here either – except those hobbling to the London Foot Hospital – yet it’s a square rich in artistic and revolutionary associations.
The painter Ford Madox Brown had fortnightly singsongs at no. 37 with his Pre-Raphaelite chums, and guests such as Turgenev and Liszt. Virginia Woolf’s blue plaque is at no. 29 (a house previously lived in by George Bernard Shaw): her Bloomsbury mates considered it a disreputable neighbourhood when she moved with her brother in 1907 (after first checking with the police). In 1913, artist Roger Fry set up his Omega Workshops at no. 33, padding the walls with seaweed to keep out the noise. In the 1890s the square was home to the International Anarchist School for Children, run by 60-year-old French anarchist Louise Michel. The police eventually raided the building and closed down the school after finding bombs hidden in the basement.
A revolutionary of more international fame – the Venezuelan adventurer General Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816) – is commemorated with a statue at the eastern corner of the London Foot Hospital, situated on the southern side of the square. De Miranda lived nearby for a few years at 58 Grafton Way, and in 1810 he met up in Fitzrovia with fellow revolutionary Simón Bolívar; de Miranda ended his days in a Spanish prison, while Bolívar went on to liberate much of South America.
Tottenham Court Road
It’s been centuries since there was a stately mansion – the original Tottenham Court – at the northern end of Tottenham Court Road, which consistently makes a strong challenge for London’s least prepossessing, central shopping street. A rash of stores flogging discount-priced electrical equipment pack out the southern end, while furniture-makers – the street’s original vendors – from Habitat and Heal’s to cheap sofa outlets, pepper its northern stretch.
CROSSRAIL
Near where Tottenham Court Road tube station used to be, there’s now a
very large hole in the ground – just one of several prominent sites
across London due to the £15 billion Crossrail project. Aimed at relieving congestion on the
tube, Crossrail will provide a super-fast method of crossing the city
from east to west (and vice versa) by digging a thirteen-mile long,
deep-bore tunnel, reducing travel time between Paddington and Liverpool
Street stations to just ten minutes. The development around the new
station at Tottenham Court Road alone is going to cost around £1
billion, and the first trains are due to run in 2018. If you want to
learn more about the project, visit crossrail.co.uk or head
for the Visitor Centre (Tues & Thurs noon–8pm) at 16–18
St Giles High St.