Piccadilly

For other uses, see Piccadilly (disambiguation).

Piccadilly street sign.

Piccadilly is a major street in central London, UK, running from Hyde Park Corner in the west to Piccadilly Circus in the east. It is completely within the city of Westminster. The street is part of the A4 road, London's second most important western artery. St James's lies to the south of the eastern section of the street, while the western section is built up only on the northern side and overlooks Green Park. The area to the north is Mayfair.

It is the location of Fortnum & Mason, the Royal Academy, The Ritz Hotel, the RAF Club, and Hatchards book shop. Simpsons, once amongst the United Kingdom's leading clothing stores, opened on Piccadilly in the 1930s. The store closed in 1999 and the site is now the flagship shop of the booksellers Waterstone's.

History

Until the 17th century the street was known as Portugal Street. The name Piccadilly may have arisen from a tailor named Robert Baker, who owned a shop on the Strand, in the late 16th century and early 17th century. He amassed a large fortune by making and selling piccadills (also called picadils or pickadils—stiff collars with scalloped edges and a broad lace or perforated border), that were then in fashion. With his great fortune he purchased a large tract of what was then open country to the west of London, and in about 1612 he built a large house there. The mansion soon became known as Piccadilly Hall. After the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, Piccadilly and the area to the north (Mayfair) began to be systematically developed as a fashionable residential locality. Some of the grandest mansions in London were built on the northern side of Piccadilly: Clarendon House (now the location of Albemarle Street), Berkeley House (later Devonshire House), and Sir John Denham's house (later Burlington House) were constructed in the 17th century. Later mansions included Melbourne House (now The Albany), Apsley House, Bath House (home to the Barons Ashburton) and Cambridge House. Several members of the Rothschild family had mansions at the western end of the street, and that part of it was colloquially referred to as Rothschild Row. By the 1920s most of these buildings had been demolished or were in institutional use. The enlargement of Park Lane and the formation of Hyde Park Corner as a major traffic gyratory system has truncated the western stretch of Piccadilly, with the result that Apsley House has become detached from it.

The Ritz

21st century Piccadilly is not one of London's principal shopping streets, despite the presence of several famous shops. The Ritz Hotel is in the street, along with some other luxury hotels. There are also some offices and some very expensive flats. Piccadilly is one of the widest and straightest streets in central London.

Fiction

Many P.G. Wodehouse novels use the setting of Piccadilly as the playground of the rich, idle bachelor in the inter-war period of the 20th century. Notable instances of this are present in the characters of Bertie Wooster and his Drones Club companions in the Jeeves stories and the character of James Crocker in the story Piccadilly Jim.

In Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula, Count Dracula owns a house at Piccadilly.

In Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, the family mansion Marchmain House, which is supposedly located in a cul-de-sac off St James's, near Piccadilly, is demolished and replaced with luxury flats; although an incident in fiction, this is, in fact, representative of the period. In Granada TV's dramatization of the novel Bridgewater House in Cleveland Row, which like its prototype backs on to Green Park, was used as the exterior of Marchmain House.

In Arthur Machen's 1894 novella The Great God Pan, Helen Vaughan, the satanic villainess and offspring of Pan, lives off Piccadilly in the pseudonynmous Ashley Street.

Margery Allingham's fictional detective, Albert Campion, has a flat at 17A Bottle Street, Piccadilly, over a police station. However, Bottle Street is a made-up name.

In the Lord Peter Wimsey novels by Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter's address in London is 110a Piccadilly. The number 110a was chosen in homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's use of 221b Baker Street for Sherlock Holmes.

In the 1881 comic opera Patience, the popular poetaster and fraud Bunthorne's means of publicizing himself is to walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in his medieval hand.

In a Virginia Woolf short story, The Legacy, the main character's (Gilbert Clandon) wife kills herself by stepping into on coming traffic at Piccadilly.

There was a British film made in 1929 called Piccadilly.

The British band Squeeze refers to the area in the song "Piccadilly" on their album East Side Story with the lyrics "She meets me in piccadilly/A begging folk singer stands tall by the entrance/His song relays worlds of most good intentions/A fiver a ten p in his hat for collection."

The American band OneRepublic references Piccadilly in their song "Good Life" with the lyrics "Woke up in London yesterday/Found myself in the city near Piccadilly."

Transport

The Piccadilly Line of the London Underground takes its name from Piccadilly and part of the line travels under Piccadilly. Green Park, Hyde Park Corner, and Piccadilly Circus tube stations all have entrances either in or near Piccadilly.

Selected adjoining streets include:

• Albemarle Street
• Dover Street
• Hyde Park Corner
• Old Bond Street
• Piccadilly Circus
• Regent Street
• St James's Street

See also

• Piccadilly Circus
• St James's Church, Piccadilly

References

• Robert Baker of Piccadilly Hall and His Heirs by F.H.W. Sheppard (ISBN 0-902087-18-5)

External links

• The Early History of Piccadilly — from the Survey of London
• An article from the International Herald Tribune about the closing of Simpsons, its history and place on Piccadilly