Chapter Fourteen
Piccadilly Circus
The Collar That Became the Centre of London
Why is Piccadilly Circus called Piccadilly Circus?
In brief: Piccadilly grew from the fashionable piccadill collars associated with tailor Robert Baker and his Piccadilly Hall. Circus described the planned circular junction later served by the station.
Transport context: London Underground station.
In the first years of the seventeenth century, a fashionable man cannot dress himself quickly.
Linen must be washed, starched, pleated and arranged. A collar may stand out around the neck like a small white fortification, forcing the head upwards and turning every movement into ceremony. Its edges are cut and worked into points. The garment is expensive, inconvenient and therefore desirable.
One name for such an edge or collar is a piccadill.
Robert Baker knows what a collar can earn.
He is a tailor in a London governed by rank and appearance, where clothing does not merely cover the body but announces a person’s place before he speaks. Baker’s trade in fashionable piccadills becomes prosperous enough for the garment to escape the wardrobe. Around 1612 he acquires land beyond the built-up western edge of London and constructs a substantial house. People call it Piccadilly Hall.1
A piece of linen has become architecture.
The transformation does not stop there.
The house gives its name to the ground around it. The ground gives its name to a road. The road gives its name to a railway line. Eventually a passenger on the Underground can travel along the Piccadilly line without knowing that the word once stood around a Jacobean throat.
This is how London expands: first as appetite, then as property, then as language.
Baker’s fields lie north of the road from Charing Cross towards Hyde Park Corner. In the early seventeenth century this is not yet the continuous city. St James’s remains a landscape of royal ground, scattered houses, lanes, pasture and speculative opportunity. A tailor who has profited from the court can purchase land because the court is moving westward and London will follow it.
Baker is not merely successful. He is early.
His house becomes a landmark, and landmarks shorten directions. The district is called Piccadilly before official taste can impose something more dignified. After the restoration of Charles II, part of the road is known as Portugal Street in honour of Catherine of Braganza, the king’s Portuguese queen. The royal name has every advantage except common use. Piccadilly persists.2
A queen loses to a collar.
The road grows fashionable. Clubs, mansions, hotels and shops gather along it. To live near Piccadilly is to live close to court, parks and the western approaches without surrendering the pleasures of town. The name no longer sounds like haberdashery. Repetition has made it grand.
Two centuries after Baker’s house, another man redraws the area with a ruler and a royal commission.
John Nash’s Regent Street is intended to connect the Prince Regent’s residence at Carlton House with the new park to the north. It is not a single straight road but a sequence of architectural effects: terraces, curves, vistas and controlled changes of direction. At its meeting with Piccadilly, Nash forms a circular junction known as Regent Circus South. The word circus comes from the Latin for a ring. It describes the shape, not the entertainment.3
In 1819 the junction is new enough to be planned and formal enough to appear complete.
It will not remain either.
London’s traffic treats geometry as a temporary suggestion. Omnibuses, cabs, private carriages and delivery carts multiply. Shops draw pedestrians. Theatres pull evening crowds towards the neighbouring streets. The ordered circle becomes a place of crossing, stopping, shouting and misjudgement.
By the later nineteenth century, the city cuts another road into it.
Shaftesbury Avenue is driven from Piccadilly Circus towards New Oxford Street in the 1880s as part of a programme of street improvement and clearance. The new road opens access through congested districts and removes large areas of housing in the process. Its arrival breaks the original symmetry of Nash’s circus. The junction keeps the word after losing much of the shape.4
Then London places an angel in the middle and gives him the wrong name.
The Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain is erected in 1892–93 to commemorate Anthony Ashley-Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, whose campaigns addressed factory labour, child employment, housing and the treatment of vulnerable people. Alfred Gilbert designs a fountain crowded with marine forms and surmounts it with a winged archer cast in aluminium, a material still novel enough to make the figure seem almost weightless.5
The official description calls the figure the Angel of Christian Charity. Gilbert’s conception is also associated with Anteros, the figure of requited or selfless love. London looks once, sees a naked winged archer and calls him Eros.
The wrong name wins because it is easier to remember.
Piccadilly has done this before.
The Angel London Renamed
The memorial is meant to direct attention towards Lord Shaftesbury. Instead, the archer takes possession of the site.
He stands on one foot, bow extended, body turned against the weight of the metal. The pose is a moment before release or after it; the arrow’s destination lies beyond the sculpture. Gilbert has produced an image of movement for a junction that has too much of it.
People meet at Eros. They wait beneath Eros. Newspapers use Eros as a shorthand for the West End. The memorial’s moral programme recedes behind the practical usefulness of a recognisable figure.
This is not simple ignorance. It is the way public places are made.
A committee can commission a monument and an artist can load it with meaning. Once installed, the object belongs partly to the crowd. Londoners rename it according to what they can see, what they can say and what other people will understand. The Angel of Christian Charity becomes Eros just as Robert Baker’s house became Piccadilly Hall. Accuracy yields to circulation.6
The figure also acquires a neighbourhood that makes the popular identification seem plausible. Theatres, music halls and restaurants fill the surrounding streets. Soho lies close by. Electric advertisements begin to occupy the buildings around the circus in the early twentieth century, turning masonry into display. Pleasure is not the only business conducted here, but it is the one most brightly announced.
Below the archer, another circle is being made.
The Baker Street and Waterloo Railway opens its Piccadilly Circus station on 10 March 1906. The Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway follows in December, and the station becomes an interchange between the routes now called the Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines. Leslie Green provides a surface building in the red glazed style used across the new electric tubes.7
The station is immediately inadequate to the fame of its address.
In 1907 about one and a half million passengers use it. By the early 1920s the annual total has multiplied many times. Lifts and a small street-level booking hall cannot comfortably absorb the crowds arriving for shops, theatres, offices and the interchange itself. The problem above ground is circular: too many people must cross the traffic to reach the station. The solution is to put the circulation beneath the circus.8
Charles Holden is given the task.
He does not design another prominent building. He removes the need for one.
Between 1925 and 1928, Piccadilly Circus station is reconstructed around a large elliptical booking hall below the road. Entrances descend from several corners, allowing pedestrians to pass beneath the traffic. Escalators replace the old dependence on lifts. Bronze fittings, pale stone and carefully controlled signs create a public interior whose authority comes from proportion rather than ornament. The shape of the booking hall follows the junction above, preserving in concrete the circle that the streets have already damaged.9
During construction, the memorial fountain is moved away for safety. Eros leaves Piccadilly Circus so that the ground beneath Eros can be hollowed out. When the work is complete, the figure returns to a junction whose centre has become the roof of a station.
The new hall costs half a million pounds. It lies only a short distance below the street, yet it produces the sensation of entering a separate civic room. The columns, passages and escalators organise what the surface cannot. Above, vehicles compete. Below, people are sorted by signs.
The calm is engineered at close quarters. The road lies only nine feet above the roof of the ticket hall. Seven steel columns support the centre of the ellipse; fifty more form a double ring around it. Four pedestrian subways divide into seven street entrances, so the crowd can descend from different sides rather than converge upon a single doorway. Cream travertine, bronze rails, clocks and lettering make the machinery of circulation look inevitable.9
It is not inevitable. The station is built while Piccadilly Circus continues to carry the life of the West End above it. The achievement is partly one of concealment: a large railway interior inserted beneath a junction without leaving a large railway building upon it. Leslie Green’s surface station closes after the new hall opens. What remains visible are openings in the pavement, signs and streams of people vanishing underground.
Holden’s design is noticed beyond London. Its clear plan and modernised classical detail later influence thinking about the Moscow Metro. In 1945 Piccadilly Circus becomes the first Underground station to receive fluorescent lighting at platform level. The centre of theatrical London acquires another kind of controlled illumination below the advertisements.9
The station has no need of a grand façade because the whole circus has become its entrance.
Piccadilly’s journey through language is now almost complete.
The piccadill was an object of display worn by those who wished to be seen. Piccadilly Hall advertised the wealth earned by making it. Piccadilly the road became a place of wealth and display. Piccadilly Circus grew into one of the most insistently visible spaces in London, eventually surrounded by illuminated advertisements that sell attention by the second.
A collar has become a screen.
Yet the older layers remain inside the modern name.
Circus remembers Nash’s geometry even where the geometry has been interrupted. Piccadilly remembers Baker’s house, and behind the house the worked edge of a fashionable garment. Eros remembers how confidently London can replace an intended meaning with a popular one.
None of these names is perfectly obedient to its object.
The collar changes form and disappears from fashion. The house is lost. The circle is broken. The Angel of Christian Charity answers to a Greek god’s name. The station built at street level is replaced by a hall beneath the road.
What survives is not accuracy but recognition.
Emerging from the Underground today, a passenger encounters a place that appears to exist entirely in the present tense. Screens change. Traffic moves. Crowds form and dissolve. The buildings offer food, clothes, performance and light. Piccadilly Circus seems less like a historical site than a machine for producing the immediate.
But the name carries a small, stiff piece of the seventeenth century through all that motion.
Somewhere behind the electric signs is a tailor calculating what London’s wealthy will wear next. He cuts linen into elaborate points. He makes enough money to build beyond the city. People see his house and use the word they already associate with him.
They do not know they are naming the centre of London.
They are only giving directions.
Notes and Sources
Survey of London, “Great Windmill Street Area”, and “The Bailiwick of St James”. Robert Baker, a tailor associated with fashionable piccadills, acquired land in the early seventeenth century and built the house known as Piccadilly Hall.↩
Survey of London, “The early history of Piccadilly”. The road’s names changed over time; Portugal Street commemorated Catherine of Braganza, but Piccadilly became the enduring usage.↩
Survey of London, “Piccadilly Circus and the eastern end of Piccadilly”. Regent Circus South was formed as part of John Nash’s Regent Street scheme and opened in the early nineteenth century; “circus” referred to the circular junction.↩
Survey of London, “Piccadilly Circus and the eastern end of Piccadilly”. Shaftesbury Avenue was constructed in the 1880s, altering Nash’s original circus and forming part of a wider programme of street improvement and clearance.↩
Historic England, “Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain Eros”, National Heritage List for England entry 1265625. The fountain was made in 1892–93 by Alfred Gilbert to commemorate Lord Shaftesbury and is surmounted by an aluminium winged archer described in the listing as the Angel of Christian Charity.↩
Historic England, “Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain Eros”, and Art UK, “Eros — Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain”. The figure has long been popularly identified as Eros, although the memorial’s intended associations concern selfless or Christian love.↩
Historic England, “Piccadilly Circus Underground Station Booking Hall”. The original station opened in 1906 and included a Leslie Green surface building before Charles Holden’s reconstruction.↩
Survey of London, “Piccadilly Circus and the eastern end of Piccadilly”, and Historic England, “Piccadilly Circus Underground Station Booking Hall”, on the rapid growth in passenger use and the need for comprehensive reconstruction.↩
Historic England, “Piccadilly Circus Underground Station Booking Hall”, and London Transport Museum, “Charles Holden: London Transport’s architect”. The station was rebuilt in 1925–28 with an underground booking hall, pedestrian subways, escalators, bronze fittings and travertine finishes designed by Holden.↩ ↩ ↩