London's Great Squares

4 December 1995. In the last entry we walked from Oxford Street down Bond Street and Regent Street, the end of which brought us to Piccadilly Circus.

This is theatreland - London is justly famous for its West End theatres and there are many to be found in Piccadilly and along Shaftesbury Avenue, that approaches it from the east. At the time of our visit the Criterion Theatre was showing Taking Sides, a new play by Ronald Harwood that earned him a nomination for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play.

The building had a Lillywhites shop as the centre of it's ground floor with the Criterion Theatre on the right and the Criterion Restaurant on the left.

A short distance away, the Piccadilly Theatre was hosting performances of Mack and Mabel, the musical based around the on-off relationship between silent films director Mack Sennett and the ultimately tragic star, Mabel Normand.

The two things everyone pictures when Piccadilly Circus is mentioned are the statue of Eros and the huge illuminated advertisements.

The statue was not meant to be Eros at all, the artist had in mind a joke with an archer about to bury a shaft into Shaftesbury Avenue. However it was set up facing the wrong way and Londoners - those incurable romantics (huh?) - soon made a link with the Greek God of Love, Eros.

In 1995 the adverts are still neon rather than the huge video screens of today. I think I rather prefer them somehow!

A quick peek into the front door and entrance to the Cafe Royal. Established in 1865, it quickly became famous for its wine cellar and was frequented by Royalty, great thinkers, artists, writers and musicians. From Oscar Wilde through the Burtons to Princess Diana and onwards, people have come here to eat and drink in convivial surroundings and to discuss the great matters of the day. It was also here that the Queensbury Rules for boxing were agreed and set down.

On the edge of Piccadilly Circus is this huge statue, set into a corner, of the Four Horses of Helios. These were the horses that pulled the fiery chariot (the sun), driven across the sky by the god Helios during the day. At night he plunged the chariot into the great ocean, thus travelling through the centre of the earth, to emerge again in the east the following morning.

The backdrop to the statue is a large curtain of falling water and with fountains before them, this was not the place to linger for long on a cold winter's night without feeling uncomfortably like wanting to create fountains or waterfalls of your own... We move on...

From Piccadilly Circus a short walk along Coventry Street brings you to Leicester Square. The Empire Cinema the following night was to host the London premiere of the film The American President with Michael Douglas and Annette Bening. We were just five minutes off meeting them but it was so cold and snowing that night that we didn't wait. When they arrived only one brave couple was there (and they must have arrived after us) and they were invited to go in and watch the premiere!

Talking of snow, it is starting tonight too as we walk down from Leicester Square to Trafalgar Square and Nelson's Column. The National Gallery is seen in the background.

And this surely dates this visit! Who uses these nowadays? But whilst mobile phones were growing in popularity by this time, we hadn't yet identified a need to have one ourselves.

Admiralty Arch, leading from Trafalgar Square towards the long straight road of The Mall and to Buckingham Palace at the far end. Commissioned by King Edward VII in memorial to his mother, Queen Victoria, he would not live to see it completed in 1912.

Miss Franny poses in front of one of the massive lions at the foot of Nelson's Column. The building of the column commenced in 1840 with the statue being raised three years later. It was another 11 years before the final bronze relief scene was placed on the pedestal and the famous lions were not installed until 1867.

Behind the water of the fountain the National Gallery is seen at the rear with the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields at the right hand side. A church has been on this site since at least 1222. King Henry VIII rebuilt it in 1542 to avoid having plague victims from the neighbourhood carried through the Palace of Westminster. At this time the church was still situated in the middle of fields in an area between the cities of London and Westminster.

The current building dates from 1722-1724 after a survey showed the 180 year old church to be in a state of decay. It is the parish church of the Royal family and contains graves of furniture maker Thomas Chippendale and, most famously, King Charles II's mistress, Nell Gwynne.

A photograph of the same scene with the fountain lit by flash.

Return to London Weekend 1995 index page

More from London, 1981

In the previous entry I finished with a couple of shots of a hotel room I stayed in back at the end of January 1981. It was my first trip for work and my first stay in a hotel with more than 12 rooms...

It's hard to take photographs of London that will have changed a lot in even thirty years. London does have some buildings that have disappeared in order to make space for things like more modern office blocks mainly. The gherkin building etc.

But the buildings that get demolished in London tend not to be the ones that you would photograph as having some great architectural features anyway. So to illustrate the point...

Admiralty Arch in 1981 looked exactly as it does in 2010. The thing that makes this photograph so nostalgic is that Austin Princess, heading past the Mall into Trafalgar Square.

My Dad used to have one of those Austin Princesses. He bought it after having a purple (yeuch!) Austin Maxi. The thing I remember most about those two British Leyland cars is that you could take hold of the gear stick and move your fist in a large circle of about a foot diameter and the gear lever would not snag at all but would happily perform the same circle. It's just not right...

My brother used it after Dad had finished with it, until the point where the rust had disappeared into one or two rather gaping holes in the doors and body... It was either going for scrap or... actually he sold it to a visiting Monster Truck show and they crushed it in their show by driving over it in a pick-up truck with rather large wheels...

Likewise the interest in this shot taken on the same trip is the already rare Commer Karrier van parked on the kerb. These were once seen everywhere. The forerunner I suppose of Ford's hugely successful Transit van. They were used a lot by the Post Office and could be seen beetling around the train station, picking up mail and packages delivered by rail.

In fact the only photograph from the trip that had any architectural or non-vehicle-related interest was this one.

Piccadilly Circus, with the traffic still passing either side of the statue of Eros (even though it wasn't meant to be Eros in the first place). Also the familiar neon signboards have yet to be replaced with video walls. JVC were about to become giants but at the time were only known for those new-fangled VHS tape thingies. And Wimpy - ah... Wimpy! Britain's own burger chain where burgers were served on a plate with chips and peas and cutlery... Or you could have a sausage bender, where the sausage was nicked and cut so that it could be rolled into a circle...

McDonalds and Burger King were on the horizon but had not yet ousted Wimpy who in this photograph are still advertising hamburgers in the window.

The Trades Descriptions Act came out in the late 1960s but it had taken them a while before they decided that as burgers were made of beef not ham, they should be termed beefburgers!

Actually hamburgers were so known because they were mainly introduced to America from the German port of Hamburg... They were introduced into Germany by that most gently persuasive of salesmen, Ghengis Khan, whose hordes didn't stop to eat so they had to eat hand held food whilst riding. To help them do this they ground their meat and shaped it into patties, placing them under their saddles so that they would be tenderised by the continous bouncing of their bodies. I'm sure McDonalds have a different way of tenderising their burgers these days though...

And finally...

...because I knew you really wanted to see this! This is the remains of the Austin Princess with my nephew standing proudly in front of it, following its demise under the wheels of the monster truck. It was now a wedge at both ends instead of just one...