Leicester Square

Why is Leicester Square called Leicester Square?

In brief: Leicester Square is named for nearby Leicester House, built for Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester. The house named the surrounding fields and later the planned square and station.

Transport context: London Underground station.

Explore related London name histories by theme →

In the autumn of 1894, Laura Ormiston Chant puts on one of her best evening gowns and goes to the Empire Theatre.

The dress is part of the investigation.

The Empire stands on the north side of Leicester Square, where its auditorium offers ballet, variety entertainment and spectacle to an audience that can choose how closely it wishes to attend. Behind the dress circle is a broad promenade, open to the bar. Hundreds of people may circulate there during an evening. Men drink, watch the stage, study one another and conduct business. Women walk the same floor, some seeking customers.¹

Chant has come because she believes the theatre’s licence permits more than entertainment.

She is a temperance advocate, a campaigner for women’s rights and a prominent figure in the social-purity movement. The phrase can sound bloodless until it enters a room. Here it means watching how men approach women, how alcohol is sold, how the theatre profits from a space in which prostitution is visible but officially separate from the performance.

Chant attends twice in evening dress. She is herself accosted.

The encounter becomes evidence.

In October she appears before the licensing committee of the London County Council and challenges the Empire’s music-and-dancing licence. She objects both to what happens in the promenade and to what she regards as indecency on the stage. Newspapers, caricaturists and music-hall performers seize upon the dispute. London gives it the name of a military campaign: the Battle of the Empire.²

The title is grander than the municipal hearing and therefore perfectly suited to Leicester Square.

For more than a century, the square has made a business of enlarging experience. A painted view becomes a battlefield. A hollow globe becomes the planet. A stage becomes an empire. A licensing dispute becomes a war.

The name above all this excitement begins with a private house beside an open field.

In 1630 Robert Sidney, second Earl of Leicester, acquired several acres in St Martin’s Field, beyond the dense western edge of London. Permission followed for him to build a substantial residence. Leicester House was completed between 1631 and 1635, standing on the northern side of ground that would later become the square.³

The earl supplied the title.

The field supplied the difficulty.

Local parishioners had customary rights in the surrounding land. It was not empty merely because it lacked houses. Cattle could graze after the harvest; people crossed it, exercised upon it and treated it as part of the working landscape around London. Sidney’s enclosure threatened those uses. Complaints and negotiation followed, and part of the ground remained open.⁴

The future Leicester Square therefore begins as a compromise between possession and access.

An aristocrat wants privacy around his new house. The neighbourhood insists that the field cannot simply vanish behind his walls. The open space survives, but its meaning changes. Leicester House gives it a social centre and a name: Leicester Fields.

London advances around the earl’s boundary.

During the 1670s, houses are laid out on the remaining sides of the open ground. The field becomes a planned urban square, though the older name continues for generations. Leicester Fields and Leicester Square describe the same transformation from different positions. One remembers land; the other announces property.⁵

The new houses attract residents who wish to live near the court without living inside the older, more crowded city. Noble families occupy several of them. Foreign diplomats arrive. Artists find both patrons and addresses.

Leicester House itself acquires a second political life in 1743, when Frederick, Prince of Wales, takes it as his London residence. Estranged from his father, George II, Frederick gathers an opposition court around him. The building named for an earl becomes the headquarters of a prince waiting for a crown he will never inherit.⁶

Across the square, another kind of authority is being made.

William Hogarth lives here during the final years of his life. Joshua Reynolds establishes his house and studio on the western side. Their presence places the square within the geography of British art, portraiture and reputation. Sitters arrive to have rank, beauty or character converted into paint. The square does not merely accommodate famous people. It helps manufacture the images by which they will be remembered.⁷

This is an early form of Leicester Square’s future trade.

People come to be seen.

Leicester House does not survive the economy it helped create. It is sold and demolished around 1791–92. Leicester Place and new buildings occupy the site. No fragment of the earl’s residence remains sufficient to explain the district to a passer-by.⁸

The name has already escaped the house.

It belongs to streets, addresses, advertisements and habit. Demolition removes the cause but not the consequence. London has repeated Leicester for more than a century. A vanished mansion now names an open space whose identity is moving away from aristocratic residence and towards public entertainment.

In May 1793, Robert Barker opens a purpose-built panorama building behind Leicester Square.

The word panorama is still new. Barker’s invention surrounds the spectator with an immense continuous painting, arranged so that the ordinary limits of the picture disappear. Visitors enter a circular building and stand upon a central platform. The frame has gone. The edge has gone. Edinburgh, London, Constantinople or a naval battle seems to extend around the room.⁹

The effect depends upon deception disciplined by architecture.

Light is controlled. The point of view is fixed. The platform hides the lower edge of the canvas, while an overhead canopy conceals the upper one. The spectator sees a world without seeing how the world has been hung.

Leicester Square learns that immersion can be sold by the ticket.

The Napoleonic Wars provide subjects of unusual commercial value. The Nile, Copenhagen, Salamanca, Badajoz and Waterloo can be inspected in London after the danger has passed. The visitor stands safely at the centre of battle while paint supplies distance, smoke and scale.

A square named for an earl begins importing the world.

In 1851, during the year of the Great Exhibition, geographer and mapmaker James Wyld carries the process farther. He erects his Great Globe within the central garden. Instead of standing outside a model of the Earth, visitors enter the globe and climb through its interior. Mountains and continents are represented upon the concave surface around them. The planet has been turned inside out so that Londoners may inspect it without leaving Leicester Square.¹⁰

The globe is educational, commercial and imperial at once.

Its geography presents the world as something that can be mapped, measured and entered from the metropolitan centre. Visitors climb stairs through a representation of territories connected by trade, conquest and curiosity. Outside, the actual square is deteriorating. Inside, the entire Earth has been arranged for comprehension.

The Great Globe is temporary. The appetite it serves is not.

On the eastern side of the square, the Royal Panopticon of Science and Art opens in 1854 beneath domes and minarets. Its promoters promise instruction through exhibitions, demonstrations and spectacle. The institution fails financially. In 1858 the building reopens as the Alhambra Palace, devoted increasingly to music, dance, circus and variety entertainment.¹¹

The change is instructive.

Science cannot pay the rent.

Spectacle can.

By the late nineteenth century, Leicester Square and the streets around it belong to London’s expanding night economy. Theatres, music halls, restaurants, public houses and hotels draw audiences west after work. The Alhambra and the Empire employ large companies, mount elaborate ballets and offer forms of entertainment that do not require the silence or social discipline of a conventional theatre.

The audience can watch and move.

That freedom is central to the Empire’s promenade. It allows people to enter without surrendering the evening to the stage. Men may drink, converse, arrange meetings and look for women. Prostitutes may find customers among them. Management can insist that any transaction is independent of the entertainment while continuing to benefit from the crowd that makes such transactions possible.

The distinction is profitable because it is difficult to police.

It is also unequal.

A respectable man may pass through the promenade without having his presence explained. A woman walking alone is more readily classified. Clothing, gesture and repetition become evidence. The architecture supplies a stage upon which women are watched even when they are not performers.

This is the room Laura Ormiston Chant enters in 1894.

The Woman in Her Best Evening Gown

Chant’s clothing protects and exposes her.

An evening gown establishes that she has come as a member of the respectable public. It also allows her to test how quickly respectability can be misread in a room organised around looking. When men approach her, she gains proof of the conduct she intends to describe before the County Council.

Her complaint is not simply that prostitution exists in London. It is that a licensed theatre has created a commercially valuable setting in which the trade can be carried on, while women on the stage are presented in costumes she regards as indecent.¹

The hearing asks who governs the West End after dark.

The Empire’s proprietors possess money, lawyers and a popular audience. The London County Council possesses the power to license music and dancing. Chant and her allies claim a civic right to intervene in places where pleasure shades into exploitation. Opponents describe them as prudish intruders attempting to impose private morality upon public amusement.

The press understands that the argument can itself become entertainment.

Letters, cartoons and parodies multiply. The Daily Telegraph publishes correspondence under the heading “Prudes on the Prowl.” Chant is caricatured as a woman invading male territory, although the Empire’s promenade depends upon women being present there. The same public that treats prostitutes as part of the attraction mocks a respectable woman for observing them.²

The Council renews the licence, but under restrictive conditions. The promenade is reduced and screened; access to drink is limited. Management installs a partition intended to separate areas of circulation and frustrate the trade Chant has exposed.

The audience supplies the next act.

On the first night under the new arrangement, men attack the barrier. They pull at the screen, break sections loose and parade fragments as trophies. Among those later associated with the disturbance is the young Winston Churchill, not yet a parliamentarian and still several years from the public career that will make every youthful anecdote easier to preserve.¹²

A municipal condition has been converted into scenery.

The men who tear down the partition present themselves as defenders of liberty. Yet their freedom depends upon access to women whose own choices are narrowed by poverty, surveillance and the risk of arrest. The controversy speaks loudly about morality and pleasure while leaving most of the women at its centre unnamed.

Their anonymity is not proof that they were unimportant.

It is part of the system.

A theatre licence records proprietors, performances and conditions. Newspapers preserve the reformer, the councillors and the famous young man in the crowd. Women earning money in the promenade appear collectively as a problem to be managed. They are visible enough to justify regulation and indistinct enough to disappear from the account.

Chant’s campaign does not end commercial sex in Leicester Square. The restrictions are modified, and the promenade culture continues. Nor does the controversy settle the question it raises. A city can close a bar, erect a screen or refuse a licence. It cannot easily separate desire, money and entertainment when all three are paying for the same room.¹³

The Battle of the Empire matters because Leicester Square has spent two centuries confusing spectatorship with possession.

Robert Sidney enclosed a field.

Barker enclosed a view.

Wyld enclosed the world.

The Empire enclosed a night-time market inside a theatre and insisted that the market was not part of the show.

The Underground arrives after the square has already become a destination.

On 15 December 1906, the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway opens its station beneath Charing Cross Road. Early plans had used the name Cranbourn Street, but the railway chooses Leicester Square for the public opening. The Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway follows with the present Northern line platforms on 22 June 1907.¹⁴

The station is not in the garden.

It stands to the east, close enough for the celebrated name to perform more useful work than the precise street address. Railway naming is an act of confidence: the company promises not merely where its trains stop but what passengers believe they can reach.

Leicester Square means theatres, restaurants, music halls and the illuminated West End.

Cranbourn Street means Cranbourn Street.

The stronger name descends underground.

The original station uses lifts. Growing traffic and the extension of the Underground network make that arrangement inadequate. During the 1930s, the station is reconstructed with new sub-surface circulation and escalators serving both lines. The work converts a collection of deep platforms into a more efficient entrance to the pleasure district above.¹⁵

By then, Leicester Square is changing its principal form of spectacle again.

The Empire closes as a theatre in 1927 and becomes a cinema. The Alhambra survives until 1936. Daly’s Theatre closes the following year. In November 1937, the new Odeon Leicester Square opens on the Alhambra site as the flagship of the Odeon chain.¹⁶

Performance moves from bodies to projection.

The room becomes darker. The audience sits more still. Film permits Leicester Square to import worlds without rebuilding Barker’s panorama or Wyld’s globe. Battles, cities and distant landscapes arrive as light upon a screen. The square that once placed visitors inside a painted circle now places them before moving images assembled elsewhere.

Cinema also renews the old business of being seen.

Premieres bring actors, photographers, crowds and barriers. The entrance becomes a performance before the film begins. People gather to watch other people arrive, repeating in electric light the square’s older exchange between spectacle and audience.

The aristocratic house has disappeared so completely that no premiere guest needs to know it existed.

Yet every ticket, marquee and station sign repeats the rank of Robert Sidney.

Walk out of the station today and follow Cranbourn Street towards the garden.

The open centre remains, although it has been altered, neglected, enclosed, restored and redesigned many times. Shakespeare stands upon the central monument erected in the nineteenth century. Cinemas face the square; theatres occupy the surrounding streets; restaurants and casinos continue the night economy in other forms.¹⁷

The Empire still exists as a cinema complex, repeatedly rebuilt. The Alhambra has gone, but the Odeon occupies its place in the history of display. The panorama rotunda has left an unexpected descendant in the circular interior of Notre Dame de France in Leicester Place. Entertainment buildings vanish more slowly than their purposes.⁹

At night, light falls across paving where the field once remained open by compromise.

There are official events, security staff, controlled entrances and crowds waiting for photographs. Regulation has not left Leicester Square. It has become part of the choreography. Barriers still decide who may pass, who must wait and who is visible on which side.

Laura Ormiston Chant would recognise the argument even if she did not recognise the technology.

What belongs to the performance?

What happens around it?

Who profits from the crowd?

Who is judged for being there?

The square has never answered these questions permanently because permanent answers are bad for business.

Its first name referred to an earl’s private residence. Its later life has depended upon public admission. House, field, garden, panorama, globe, theatre, promenade and cinema have each organised the same human appetite: to enter a place where ordinary scale is suspended and other lives can be watched.

The Weary Traveller arrives by a station built not beneath the square but beneath its reputation.

Above ground, the earl’s house is absent.

The women of the Empire promenade are mostly absent from the record.

The Great Globe, the Panopticon and the Alhambra are absent from the skyline.

Their audiences have been replaced but not abolished.

They emerge from the Underground, cross Charing Cross Road and move towards the lights.

Leicester House lasted a century and a half.

Leicester Square learned to make the name last longer than the building.

The doors open.

The night is still selling tickets.

Notes and Sources

1. Judith R. Walkowitz, “Cosmopolitanism, Feminism, and the Moving Body”, Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 38, no. 2 (2010), pp. 427–449. Walkowitz records that Laura Ormiston Chant twice visited the Empire promenade in her best evening gown and was accosted. She describes the promenade as an open space behind the dress circle and in front of the bar, with approximately five hundred people circulating nightly. See also Laura Ormiston Chant, Why We Attacked the Empire (London: Horace Marshall & Son, 1895). ↩↩

2. Walkowitz, “Cosmopolitanism, Feminism, and the Moving Body”, and Joseph Donohue, Fantasies of Empire: The Empire Theatre of Varieties and the Licensing Controversy of 1894 (University of Iowa Press, 2005). Chant challenged the Empire’s music-and-dancing licence before the London County Council in October 1894, citing prostitution in the promenade and alleged indecency in the stage entertainment. Contemporary coverage called the controversy the “Battle of the Empire”; the Daily Telegraph correspondence appeared under “Prudes on the Prowl”. ↩↩

3. Survey of London, “Leicester Square, North Side, and Lisle Street Area”, British History Online. Robert Sidney, second Earl of Leicester, acquired the site in 1630 and built Leicester House between 1631 and 1635. The house stood on the north side of the later square and gave its title to Leicester Fields and Leicester Square. ↩

4. Survey of London, “Leicester Square Area: Leicester Estate”. The estate developed from land in St Martin’s Field. Parishioners asserted customary use of the fields, including grazing after harvest, and opposed complete enclosure. The subsequent settlement preserved an open central area. The chapter treats this as a conflict over customary access rather than suggesting that the land was legally or socially unused before development. ↩

5. Survey of London, “Leicester Square Area: Leicester Estate”. Building leases around the open ground were granted during the 1670s. The area was commonly known as Leicester Fields before “Leicester Square” became dominant. ↩

6. Survey of London, “Leicester Square, North Side, and Lisle Street Area”. Frederick, Prince of Wales, took Leicester House in 1743 and maintained a political and social circle there in opposition to the court of George II. He died in 1751 before succeeding to the throne. ↩

7. London Museum, “William Hogarth painted London behaving badly”, and Survey of London, “Leicester Square Area: Leicester Estate”. Hogarth lived in Leicester Fields until his death in 1764. Sir Joshua Reynolds lived and worked on the western side of the square; his house and studio made it an important address in eighteenth-century British portraiture. ↩

8. Survey of London, “Leicester Square, North Side, and Lisle Street Area: Leicester Estate, Leicester Place”. Leicester House and its grounds were acquired by the banker Thomas Wright in 1791 or 1792. The house was demolished at about the same time, and Leicester Place was subsequently laid out across part of the site. ↩

9. Survey of London, “Leicester Square, North Side, and Lisle Street Area: Leicester Estate, Leicester Place”. Robert Barker’s purpose-built panorama rotunda opened on 25 May 1793. It was ninety feet in diameter and fifty-seven feet high and could display two circular pictures. Subjects later included major battles of the Napoleonic Wars and views of cities around the world. Part of the rotunda’s circular form was retained when the building was converted into the French Roman Catholic church of Notre Dame de France. ↩↩

10. Survey of London, “Leicester Square Area: Leicester Estate”. James Wyld’s Great Globe occupied the central garden from 1851. Visitors entered the hollow structure and viewed a relief representation of the Earth upon its inner surface. The exhibit combined geographical instruction with commercial spectacle during the period of the Great Exhibition. ↩

11. Survey of London, “Leicester Square, East Side: Leicester Estate, Nos. 17–30 Leicester Square”. The Royal Panopticon of Science and Art opened in 1854. After financial failure it was converted in 1858 into the Alhambra Palace, which became one of London’s major venues for ballet, variety and popular spectacle. ↩

12. Donohue, Fantasies of Empire, provides the most extensive study of the licensing dispute, the restrictions imposed upon the promenade and the audience’s destruction of the barrier. Winston Churchill’s involvement is reported in later accounts and is treated here cautiously as an association preserved by the historiography rather than as the essential fact of the incident. ↩

13. Walkowitz, “Cosmopolitanism, Feminism, and the Moving Body”, and Donohue, Fantasies of Empire. The restrictions did not eradicate prostitution from the Empire or settle the wider conflict over commercial entertainment, municipal licensing and women’s presence in public leisure spaces. ↩

14. Douglas Rose, The London Underground: A Diagrammatic History (Capital Transport), and Transport for London, “Leicester Square Underground Station”. The Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway station opened on 15 December 1906; the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway platforms opened on 22 June 1907. Early railway plans used the proposed name Cranbourn Street, but the station opened as Leicester Square. It currently serves the Piccadilly and Northern lines and is addressed on Cranbourn Street. ↩

15. H. G. Follenfant, Reconstructing London’s Underground (London Transport Executive, 1974), and London Transport Museum, “Escalators at Leicester Square Underground station, 1935”. The station was substantially reconstructed during the early 1930s with a new sub-surface ticket hall and escalator access to both lines, replacing the original dependence upon lifts. ↩

16. Survey of London, “Leicester Square Area: Leicester Estate”, and Historic England, “The projection room in the Odeon Cinema”. The Empire ceased theatrical use in 1927, the Alhambra closed in 1936 and Daly’s Theatre in 1937. Odeon Leicester Square opened in November 1937 on the Alhambra site as the flagship cinema of the Odeon chain, designed by Harry Weedon and Andrew Mather. ↩

17. Westminster City Council, “Leicester Square Gardens”, and Survey of London, “Leicester Square Area: Leicester Estate”. The central garden has undergone repeated periods of enclosure, decline and restoration. Its principal monument, unveiled in 1874, represents Shakespeare and is surrounded by busts associated with the square’s artistic history. ↩