Seven Dials: The Pillar of Six Sundials
Why is it significant?
Stand by the slim column in the middle of the junction and turn slowly on your heel. Seven streets fan out around you like the spokes of a wheel, and on top of the pillar a block carries the faces of sundials. Count them, and you will find only six.
Key Facts
| Place | Seven Dials: The Pillar of Six Sundials |
|---|---|
| Address | Seven Dials, London WC2H 9HD, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51380, -0.12700 |
| Part of Walk | Curtain Up: London's West End Theatreland, from the Savoy to Covent Garden and Leicester Square |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand by the slim column in the middle of the junction and turn slowly on your heel. Seven streets fan out around you like the spokes of a wheel, and on top of the pillar a block carries the faces of sundials. Count them, and you will find only six.
The answer to the riddle is that the pillar itself is the seventh dial, its shadow telling the time across the street. The whole layout was the idea of Thomas Neale, Master of the Mint and an enthusiastic projector of lotteries and schemes, in the 1690s. Rents in those days were calculated by the length of a house's front, and a star of streets packed in more corners, more frontages... and more rent.
Neale's elegant quarter did not stay elegant. By the eighteenth century this was the edge of the slum known as the St Giles rookery, a maze of gin shops and lodging houses. In 1773 the pillar was pulled down, partly, it is said, to drive away the idlers who gathered round it, and partly because of a rumour that treasure was buried underneath. No treasure was found, and the column eventually ended up in the Surrey town of Weybridge, where it still stands as a memorial to a duchess.
Charles Dickens loved the place for its sheer chaos, and wrote about its crowds and alleys. The printers of Seven Dials churned out cheap broadsheet ballads, songs of murders and hangings, sold for a penny on street corners across the country. And in 1929 Agatha Christie borrowed the name for a novel, The Seven Dials Mystery... which is worth remembering, because her name is waiting at the next stop.
The pillar you see is a faithful copy, unveiled in 1989 by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, a nod to the Dutch king William III, who reigned when the original was set up. Now take West Street, heading south-west, to two little theatres standing side by side.