Holborn: Seven Dials

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RUSSIA authentic Antique Times of London Map Large 40x53cm 117 years old - 1895
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Sir Walter Besant, in The Fascination of London, published in 1903, continues his survey of Holborn with this look at Seven Dials:

All the ground to the south of Shaftesbury Avenue was anciently, if not actually a pond, at all events very marshy ground, and was called Meershelands, or Marshlands.

It was subsequently known as Cock and Pye Fields, from the Cock and Pye public-house, which is supposed to have been situated at the spot where Little St. Andrew Street, West Street, and Castle Street now meet.

The date at which this name first appeared is uncertain; it is met with in the parish books after 1666.

In the reign of William III a Mr. Neale took the ground, and transformed the great ditch which crossed it into a sewer, preparatory to the building of Seven Dials.

The name of this notorious place has been connected with degradation and misery, but at first it was considered rather an architectural wonder.

Evelyn, in his diary, October 5, 1694, says: "I went to see the building beginning near St. Giles, where seven streets make a star from a Doric pillar placed in the middle of a circular area, said to be built by Mr. Neale."

Gay also refers to the central column in his "Trivia."

The column had really only six dial faces, two streets converging toward one. In the open space on which it stood was a pillory, and the culprits who stood here were often most brutally stoned.

One John Waller, charged with perjury, was killed in this manner in 1732.

In 1773 the column was taken down in a search for imaginary treasure.

It was set up again in 1822 on Weybridge Green as a memorial to the Duchess of York, who died 1820.

The dial was not replaced, and was used as a stepping-stone at the Ship Inn at Weybridge; it still lies on one side of the Green.

The streets of Seven Dials attained a very unenviable reputation, and were the haunt of all that was vicious and bad. Terrible accounts of the overcrowding and consequent immorality come down to us from the newspaper echoes of the earlier part of the nineteenth century.

The opening up of the new thoroughfares of New Oxford Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, and Charing Cross Road, have done much, but the neighbourhood is still a slum. The seven streets remain in their starlike shape, by name Great and Little White Lion Street, Great and Little St. Andrew Street, Great and Little Earl Street, and Queen Street.

Next: Holborn: Benjamin Franklin