Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Turn right into Broadwick Street and follow it to Carnaby Street, a busy general market
until 1820. The area housed Huguenot refugees in the seventeenth century and remained
very much a quarter of shopkeepers and tradesmen with a reputation for first-rate poulter-
ers, porkmen and fishmongers.
Turn left into Carnaby Street, then right into Beak Street and take Upper John Street
to Golden Square. The house of Doctor James Stanier Clarke, the Royal Librarian who
showed Jane around Carlton House, was on the north side at No. 37. In December 1815 he
wrote to her to offer the use of his personal library and to assure her that there was always a
maid in attendance. There is no record of Jane's response to the shocking invitation to visit
an unmarried man's home.
An 1818 bill from the Lion Brewhouse in Broad Street, now Broadwick
Street. Beer was a much safer drink than water; in 1854 Doctor John
Snow finally proved the connection between contaminated water sup-
ply and cholera with evidence gathered following the deaths of users of
a pump on this site.
Return to Beak Street by Upper James Street, turn right and continue to No. 65, the start
of a row of houses with early nineteenth-century shop fronts interrupted by an incongruous
pub façade of 1847.
The battered statue of George II in the centre H5H of Golden Square.
Turning right down Lexington Street brings us to the junction with Brewer Street where
Great Windmill Street's curves preserve the line of an ancient track from what is now Pic-
cadilly Circus to a windmill that stood in the fields close by.
If you turn left along Brewer Street then right into Wardour Street you will find the
gardens and remains of St Anne's Church behind a forbidding modern screen. From the
1630s to the mid-nineteenth century an estimated 100,000 people were buried in the ¾-acre
