Kingly Court — Hidden Courtyard
Now look around you. We just slipped off Carnaby Street through a narrow passageway... and suddenly the noise, the crowds, the chaos of Soho — it all falls away. Welcome to Kingly Court... one of London's best-kept secrets, hiding in plain sight.
London · from the walk “Soho's Secret Side”
Kingly Court, Carnaby Street, London W1B 5PW
Now look around you. We just slipped off Carnaby Street through a narrow passageway... and suddenly the noise, the crowds, the chaos of Soho — it all falls away. Welcome to Kingly Court... one of London's best-kept secrets, hiding in plain sight.
This enormous three-storey courtyard is right Here, tucked between Carnaby Street and Beak Street, and yet thousands of people walk past those unassuming entrances every single day without ever knowing it exists.
Now, the ground beneath your feet has a story that goes back over three hundred years. In sixteen eighty-two, Sir William Pulteney leased this land — then part of a place called Six Acre Close — to a bricklayer named Richard Tyler. But there was a catch. Part of the ground was excluded from the lease... because a windmill and a well had once stood here. The lease even preserved the right to rebuild that windmill if anyone ever wanted to. And historians believe that excluded ground... may be the very site of Kingly Court.
So you're standing on what was once a windmill plot in open fields, just north of Piccadilly. The street beside us, Kingly Street, was known simply as King Street until nineteen oh six — renamed to avoid confusion with the many other King Streets across London.
And this street has Extraordinary secrets. At number eleven, there was a place called the Tatty Bogle — an after-hours drinking club. During World War Two, it doubled as a bomb shelter, and its membership book included the names Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt — three of the infamous Cambridge Five Soviet spies! Imagine them huddled down there, just meters from where you're standing, sipping whisky while bombs fell overhead... and while secretly passing state secrets to Moscow.
And at number Nine Kingly Street, a basement club called the Bag O'Nails opened in nineteen sixty-five. On the twenty-fifth of November, nineteen sixty-six, the Jimi Hendrix Experience played their First ever gig there. The club only held a hundred people, and the audience that night was staggering — Eric Clapton, John Lennon, Paul Mccartney, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page. Rock royalty, crammed into a tiny cellar. And it was Here that Paul Mccartney met his future wife, Linda Eastman, on the fifteenth of May, nineteen sixty-seven.
Now, as for Kingly Court itself — by the mid-twentieth century, this courtyard had become... a car park. Just a dull patch of concrete. But a recent redevelopment transformed it into a culinary haven, inspired by bustling European piazzas.
And here's one more hidden gem within this hidden gem. Somewhere beneath your feet is Cahoots — a theatrical cocktail bar themed as a fictional nineteen-forties underground station, complete with a life-size vintage tube carriage, tucked away in Kingly Court. You descend old wooden escalators, follow signs reading "To the Trains"... and find yourself in a world of swing music, wartime cocktails, and bunting. There is, of course, no real tube station down there. It's pure imagination. But in Soho... the line between reality and fantasy has always been deliciously blurred.