American English please
What is the origin of the name Piccadilly Circus? If you hear the name for the first time you’ll probably think it was the site of a Roman circus, where Londoners used to watch gladiators fighting and a few Christians tossed to the lions. Nothing in fact could be more wrong. In fact, as far as London history goes, Piccadilly Circus is a fairly new creation.
When John Nash built Regent Street, in the early 1800’s, the circus was then called Regent Circus, and it was only later that this was changed to its present name. But why Piccadilly, then? Well, there are several explanations for the name. One of the earliest that I picked up was in the 17th century Guide to Restoration London, which referred to ‘pick a dilly’, which, because of the way the word was broken up, led me to assume that it was where Londoners used to pick daffodils. Now that is not as daft as it might seem, because Piccadilly at that time was right on the edge of London, and it was surrounded by fields and windmills.
Now the true explanation is that the piccadillies were not flowers at all, but shirt collars of the sort you can see in those paintings of Charles I and his cavaliers. It was here that the London tailors used to make them. Fashion has always been linked with the Circus, particularly in the early 1890’s, where the Victorian dandies used to strut about sporting their Piccadilly weepers. These were those long whiskers and sideboards jutting out sideways from their chins. And on their arm would be their girlfriend, whose hair would be cut short at the front and curled over their forehead into the Piccadilly fringe.
Fashion and romance are always intertwined and so it’s only fair to include Piccadilly’s most famous landmark –the statue of Eros–, which is not, I’m sorry to say, the statue of the God of Love at all. In fact, it’s supposed to be the Angel of Cristian Charity and was put there to perpetuate the memory of the Seventh Earl of Shaftsbury, who was famous in the last century for pioneering some urgently needed reforms in the factories and over child labour. It was because of his slum clearance work that present-day Shaftsbury Avenue was named after him, when a lot of the existing hovels were pulled down. So Shaftsbury has two monuments to his credit: Shaftsbury Avenue and the statue of Eros. One last point. Everyone knows that Eros is blind and that he never knows where he is firing at. And the statue certainly underlines this point, because when he was taken down about 1925, because of the underground which was being built beneath it, there was such an outcry for his return that he was brought back. But instead of pointing to Shafstbury Avenue, as he should be, he’s pointing in the wrong direction, firing his arrows, as usual, the wrong way.
