Piccadilly

London's West End and the Pursuit of Pleasure

Stephen Hoare

• Editore: The History Press
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780750998383
• Argomento: Geschichte
• Categoria: Sozialgeschichte

Piccadilly, London's milelong western artery, was originally known for its busy coaching inns and magnificent aristocratic palaces, and, more recently, for its internationally renowned department stores, theatres, restaurants and hotels. At the junction of five major roads, Piccadilly Circus became known as the 'Hub of Empire'. Balancing enterprise, profit and pleasure, it marks the divide between polite society and a bustling nightlife.

In this book, London historian Stephen Hoare explores how and why 'Dilly' has always been a haunt for pleasure seekers. It traces the development of London's West End from its aristocratic origins right through to its hedonistic heyday, when the Bright Young Things rubbed shoulders with royalty, film stars, gangsters, pimps and prostitutes. Today, Piccadilly's traditional institutions, such as Hatchards, Fortnum and Mason, the Royal Academy and the Ritz, sit alongside sushi bars, Viennese coffee shops and fashionable jewellers and boutiques as the neon lights of the Circus continue to attract visitors from across the globe.

1

A CIRCUS TO THE WORLD

The Circus is full of the flashing and twinkling of multitudinous lights of hurrying hansoms, of many carriages speeding home to supper, of streams of people, men and women, mostly in evening dress, walking along, smiling and jesting.

Robert Machray, The Night Side of London

INTRODUCTION

Piccadilly is the centre of London’s bustling West End – an entertainment and shopping district that encompasses the Strand, Charing Cross Road, Leicester Square, Haymarket, Regent Street, Oxford Street and Bond Street. Piccadilly is the hub of theatre-land. Piccadilly Circus is dead centre – of London … of England … of the United Kingdom … possibly of the world? It is a curious and eclectic blend of the international scene and a small village where everyone knows everyone else.

It once marked the western extent of London and acquired its name from the word ‘piccadill’. This is the ruff adorning the collar of an Elizabethan gentleman’s coat. For a brief time during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the eastern end of Piccadilly, the most built-up part closest to the Court of St James’s, had been officially named Portugal Street in honour of Charles II’s Portuguese consort, Catherine of Braganza. The links to the royal family of the time provided a driver for the cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial Piccadilly, and its entertainment hub.

If we could journey back in time, the 1890s would have been the moment when Piccadilly and its traffic circus with its famous statue came to symbolise Britain’s vibrant capital city with all its confidence and charisma. It became one of the great streets of the world like New York’s Times Square, Paris’s Champs-Élysées, Rome’s Via del Corso and Berlin’s Unter den Linden.

Piccadilly Circus was not only the hub of an empire but a focal point for the West End with its luxury shops, hotels, restaurants and theatres. It has always been a surprisingly close-knit community in terms of the people who live locally, who operate businesses, both local and global, or who come to Piccadilly for entertainment and pleasure.

ANTEROS

The iconic Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain and its statue was erected in 1893 in honour of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, and stands in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. This centrepiece of the Circus somehow represents the contradictions and contrasts that are characteristic of the area.

Lord Shaftesbury, a parliamentarian, philanthropist and social reformer, had died in 1885 and a public subscription was raised to build a public monument. Where better than the vacant site in the middle of Piccadilly Circus? But it took considerable time for the charitable committee to decide on what form the memorial should take. In the end it was thought that a drinking fountain would be most appropriate.

The memorial fountain would be topped by a sculpture. Sculptor Alfred Gilbert was commissioned to design the winged figure of Anteros, the brother of Eros and known in classical mythology as the god of selfless love. Gilbert modelled the figure on his 16-year-old studio assistant Angelo Colarossi. After creating a clay model of the subject, the statue was cast in aluminium – the first time this soft metal had been used to create a sculpture. The statue stood atop the memorial’s substantial bronze fountain.

Even now, people confuse the winged youth taking aim with a bow and arrow with Eros, mischievous god of love. Anteros was intended to represent Shaftesbury’s selfless sacrifice, but people associated the statue with the sex trade around Piccadilly Circus and nearby Soho, the theatres, music halls and nightclubs and the pursuit of pleasure. The earl’s worthy mission to help the poor was soon forgotten.

The steps at the base of the fountain were home to half a dozen cockney flower sellers who used the running water to keep their blooms fresh. Despite being conceived as a public drinking fountain, the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain was never used as such. The bronze drinking cups tethered to the fountain by chain were stolen within weeks. The flower sellers in their fringed shawls moved in and were a fixture of London street life right up to and throughout the Second World War and provided a vignette and the opportunity for song and dance for cockney flower sellers in the musical My Fair Lady.

PAVING THE WAY FOR PLEASURE

The word ‘circus’ has ancient origins. Rome’s Circo Massimo (Circus Maximus) was originally built for the Emperor Vespasian: a gigantic oval circuit where crowds of spectators could watch chariot races and military parades. Piccadilly Circus may not have much in common with its Roman namesake, but it was an equally bold idea to enable traffic to move freely and to promote trade and business locally. Not quite the ‘bread and circuses’ of the Roman Empire but providing a similar opportunity for ease of movement to facilitate relaxation and ‘letting off steam’.

The name was borrowed from classical antecedents by architect John Nash when planning Regent Street in the early 1800s. Stretching from Regent’s Park in the north to St James’s Park in the south, Regent Street was conceived as an ambitious residential and commercial development whose buildings would showcase Nash’s classical style. Properties along the route were acquired by the Crown and demolished to help create a street that would be as wide and straight as possible. Apart from a kink in the road skirting around All Saints, Langham Place and the Quadrant, a curved section of colonnaded arcade where Regent Street feeds into Piccadilly Circus, Nash’s route is remarkably straight.

Three large circular roundabouts, Regent’s Circus, Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus, were planned to be built where Regent Street cut across existing roads. In the event, Regent’s Circus was only half completed and became a crescent. Oxford Circus was shrunk in size so that today it appears as a simple road junction, and Piccadilly Circus, the only part of Nash’s road plan to survive, was built in 1816.

Widening Regent Street to create a ‘circus’ roundabout where the street crossed bustling Piccadilly was the only way of avoiding arguments over rights of way. Horse-drawn traffic quickly adapted to the new rule of moving clockwise around the new Piccadilly Circus. Nash’s solution to a potential traffic hazard was the first of its kind in England and became a model that was used in later centuries to replace busy crossroads or simplify awkward road junctions.

However, Piccadilly Circus had yet to achieve its present form. Shaftesbury Avenue was built between 1877 and 1886 by architect George Vulliamy and engineer Joseph Bazalgette to create a north–south artery linking Regent Street with Charing Cross. A key feature of the planned route was that it would spearhead a slum clearance scheme to eradicate notorious centres of poverty, such as the ‘rookeries’ of St Giles, and improve parts of Soho.

The new road, which was to sweep away so much poverty and human misery (or possibly relocate it in less salubrious areas of town), was named in honour of the same Lord Shaftesbury commemorated by the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain in Piccadilly Circus. Among his many achievements were the protection of children who worked as chimney sweeps and the Factories Act of 1847.

Leading from New Oxford Street and cutting through the Charing Cross Road at Cambridge Circus, Shaftesbury Avenue linked with London’s thriving West End, necessitating an enlarged road layout and the creation of a hub at Piccadilly Circus whose spokes were Tichborne Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, Coventry Street, Haymarket, Upper and Lower Regent’s Street and Piccadilly. The completion of Shaftesbury Avenue in 1885 added six well-appointed theatres including the London Pavilion, the Trocadero, the Lyric, the Apollo, the Palace Theatre on Cambridge Circus, which opened briefly as Richard D’Oyly Carte’s Royal English Opera House, and the New Prince’s Theatre, since renamed the Shaftesbury Theatre. These palaces of pleasure helped cement the growing appeal of the West End’s diverse theatreland. It was the expansion and improvement of the road network that enabled this development of the performing arts.

Modern road improvements set the perimeter of Soho, an enclave of original Hogarthian London whose densely populated grid pattern of grimy and dilapidated Georgian streets and alleyways was home to a thriving cosmopolitan community composed of virtually every nation on earth. A large Jewish community supported a garment industry based around small sweatshops. This later developed into the ‘rag trade’ located in and around Berwick Street, as well as Berwick Street Market. The need for theatrical costumiers drove this development in Piccadilly.

Soho’s highly resourceful Italian, French and German communities gave birth to the West End’s ‘pleasure zone’ – running the luxury hotels, the plethora of restaurants both large and small offering a wide variety of regional and gourmet cuisine, and the smart, moderately priced cafés that boosted international tourism. At the same time, a growing black diaspora contributed to a lively arts scene and provided the musical spark that lit up the West End’s jazz-age nightclubs.

Redevelopment included the construction of Kingsway, a major road scheme that cut through in a straight line to Aldwych and linked with the Strand near Waterloo Bridge. Electric trams ran down Kingsway from Euston using shallow cut-and-cover tunnels at Holborn and the Strand, enabling trams to run beneath the streets and emerge onto the Thames Embankment at the foot of Waterloo Bridge, adding to the West End’s accessibility. Modern London was taking shape. These works represented the final opening up of the West End for development and they rationalised the transport networks, increasing access for theatregoers and diners.

GHOSTS OF THE PAST

Far from sounding the death knell for Piccadilly’s coaching inns, the coming of the railways fuelled demand from a younger generation eager to experience the romance of stage coaches before they were swept away forever. This wave of nostalgia is evidenced by the popularity of novels such as Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers whose plot lines are derived from scenes of life observed in coaching inns. The experience of a bumpy ride along the open road in a stage coach was recreated by a group of aristocratic enthusiasts driving horses ‘four in hand’, who saved many mail coaches from the breaker’s yard and invested their own money in maintaining the London to Brighton stage coach.

As recently as 1870, the White Bear coaching inn occupied the site where the Criterion Theatre now stands at Piccadilly Circus. Set back slightly from Nash’s Regent Street, the inn was a throwback to a different age due to its imposing classical architecture. Built in the seventeenth century to serve the old Bath Road mail route, its busy coach yard looked out onto a contemporary streetscape: hawkers, hustlers and perhaps the occasional drove of bullocks on their way to slaughter at Smithfield Market to provide the raw materials for local restaurants and eateries.

Losing its passenger trade to the White Horse Cellar and the Gloucester Coffee House further down Piccadilly, the old White Bear hung on long past the heyday of the stage coach as a parcel depot and a clearing house for goods transported by road.

Even as late as the early 1900s, the West End was dominated by horse-drawn traffic. It was not just stage coaches and horse-drawn vans or carts on their way in or out of London: much of the traffic was generated by privately owned vehicles – phaetons, chariots, chaises, landaus, hackney carriages belonging to the aristocratic denizens of Piccadilly and the rising middle classes. The amount of horse dung deposited as a result was immense. Neat sellers collected and sold this useful resource for the leather trade, providing gainful employment for many.

Public transport was a relatively late arrival, starting with George Shillibeer’s ‘Omnibus’, an enclosed carriage seating fifteen to eighteen people, which made its debut in July 1829 offering a service to fare-paying passengers between Paddington and the Bank of England. The idea caught the public imagination and served a real need. By the 1840s, Piccadilly was crowded with buses, the earliest type being a box-like affair drawn by a pair of horses with seating inside and a bench seat on the roof, which became known as ‘garden seat’ buses. Buses served the rising lower middle classes and provided an alternative to the expensive hackney carriages and four-wheeled ‘growlers’. Despite the improvements to the network, the rapid rise of traffic meant the average speed of carriages hovered at around 5mph in central London.

This equestrian economy included not just the coaching inns and their stables but also riding clothes and schools, harness makers and saddlers. Tattersall’s horse auction house stood on the south side of Hyde Park Corner, more or less opposite Apsley House.

At the lowest level, crossing sweepers, an industrious underclass of young urchins, enthusiastic beggars – ‘sturdy imposters’ – or former soldiers fallen on hard times kept the roads clear of horse droppings, surviving only on the tips they were given by a grateful public. Some achieved local fame as well-loved members of the urban communities they served. William Tomlins, a crossing sweeper who stood at Albemarle and St James’s Streets, was pictured in an engraving dated 1816 wielding a besom broom and wearing a top hat, breeches and gaiters. A contemporary treatise on London beggars describes him as being ‘alive to the receipt of every penny and will not suffer himself by any means to be diverted from his solicitations’.¹

CHANGE AND DEVELOPMENT – MARKET FORCES

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Piccadilly’s Georgian streetscape looked remarkably unchanged, with Nash’s landmark buildings on Regent Street, the ducal palaces of Piccadilly such as Albany, Burlington House and Devonshire House, and Cambridge House still being occupied by their aristocratic owners. Many palaces had been demolished to open up Mayfair, creating new streets to the north of Piccadilly. Some changes had been made in order to rationalise the road network; others were driven by market forces.

The construction of Shaftesbury Avenue and the widening of Piccadilly Circus brought modernity and rapid progress. An inn that had stood for 200 years was demolished and replaced by the Criterion Theatre and Restaurant, which in turn became an institution in its own right. The Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain came to symbolise a new era.

Opposite the Criterion stood a popular theatre and music hall, the London Pavilion. On the other side of the road, where Shaftesbury Avenue meets Piccadilly Circus, two enterprising brothers, Giacomo and Battista Monico set up the Monico Café and Restaurant in 1877, the same year as work on constructing Shaftesbury Avenue began. Over almost a century, the Monico was one of the West End’s most popular restaurants.

Where Regent Street joins Piccadilly Circus is a curved section known as the Quadrant. At the turn of the twentieth century, this was still the colonnaded walkway designed by John Na...