At the St Giles end of Shaftesbury Avenue there is a new upmarket vegetarian place. Above it you see the stret sign “Shaftesbury Avenue” Look again and you will just make out, behind the sign, some words painted on the brickwork. It says “Broad Street” and that is where you are standing.
Notice how wide it is here. Looking at the old map from 1870 this was literally the stub end of Broad Street that went as far as Drury Lane. There were four pubs and the public wash-house along that stretch of road, all long gone. At some point it got absorbed into High Holborn, though this is not Holborn. It’s where St Giles High Street begins and thankfully that has not been absorbed into High Holborn. Yet. Don’t hold your breath on that one.
In the 1880′s Shaftesbury Avenue as we know it was created by widening the road that already existed, that ran alongside the site of the leper hospital. It was the Monmouth Street that Charles Dickens writes of in Sketches by Boz. Broad Street survived that, yet looking at my 1930′s Geographia’ Atlas of London, it did not survive the mass re-naming of streets undertaken by the London County Council in the mid-thirties.
It has become just another stretch of road where the traffic clogs up and where tourists ask “where’s Covent Garden?” However the sign is painted on an old row of buildings that were all there back in 1870. To get a better look cross over to Forbidden Planet and look back. Notice the windows and then look at the shops. Arthur Beale is a ships chandler that has somehow survived from the days when this was a place to stop and talk, not simply pass through. It is a link with the metal-work workshops that once dominated the area. What else do you notice around here?
