Leicester Square: Premieres, Painters & Charlie Chaplin
Why is it significant?
Walk into Leicester Square and look for a small bronze figure in a bowler hat, leaning on a cane, with his feet turned out. That is Charlie Chaplin, placed here in 1981.
Key Facts
| Place | Leicester Square: Premieres, Painters & Charlie Chaplin |
|---|---|
| Address | Leicester Square, London WC2H 7NA, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51030, -0.13010 |
| Part of Walk | Curtain Up: London's West End Theatreland, from the Savoy to Covent Garden and Leicester Square |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into Leicester Square and look for a small bronze figure in a bowler hat, leaning on a cane, with his feet turned out. That is Charlie Chaplin, placed here in 1981. In the middle of the gardens, on a fountain, stands William Shakespeare, and around the edges the giant cinemas wait for the next red carpet.
The square is named after Leicester House, built in the 1630s by the Earl of Leicester on what had been common land. Local people had rights to dry their washing and graze animals here, so the earl was obliged to keep part of it open, and that obligation is the reason there is a square at all. Later, Leicester House became the home of princes of Wales who had fallen out with their fathers, and the painters William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds both lived on the square.
By the Victorian age the gardens had become a wasteland, and in 1874 they were bought and handed over to the public by Albert Grant, a flamboyant financier whose business methods were... let us say, adventurous. He paid for the Shakespeare statue too. Around the square rose great music halls, the Alhambra and the Empire, with ballets, acrobats and promenades where the respectable and the not so respectable mingled.
Today Leicester Square is where films have their premieres, with the stars walking the red carpet into the cinemas. And on the south side, the little ticket booth called TKTS, run by the theatres themselves, sells same-day seats for West End shows at reduced prices, so this is where many theatre nights in London really begin. Around the gardens you can also spot bronze statues of film characters, from Paddington Bear to Mary Poppins, perched on benches and railings.
So the square links the two great dream machines of the West End, stage and screen. For the finale, walk east along the south side of the square, cross Charing Cross Road, and continue down to St Martin's Lane, towards a tower topped with a great globe.