Sloane Square and the Royal Court Theatre
Why is it significant?
Stand by the fountain in the middle of Sloane Square, with the red-brick Royal Court Theatre on one side and the traffic circling around you like a slow carousel. Look at the kneeling bronze Venus on top, and then at the carvings on the bowl beneath her: a king and a woman on the bank of a river.
Key Facts
| Place | Sloane Square and the Royal Court Theatre |
|---|---|
| Address | Sloane Square, London SW1W 8AS, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.49250, -0.15660 |
| Part of Walk | Pensioners, Poets and Punks: Chelsea's Riverside History from the Royal Hospital to the King's Road, London |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand by the fountain in the middle of Sloane Square, with the red-brick Royal Court Theatre on one side and the traffic circling around you like a slow carousel. Look at the kneeling bronze Venus on top, and then at the carvings on the bowl beneath her: a king and a woman on the bank of a river. That is Charles II and Nell Gwyn, and you will meet both of them again on this walk.
The square is named after Sir Hans Sloane, a doctor who grew fabulously rich, bought the manor of Chelsea in 1712, and spent his life collecting everything: plants, coins, books, fossils, stuffed animals. When he died in 1753, Parliament bought his collection of around seventy thousand objects, and it became the founding core of the British Museum. Half of this neighbourhood still carries his name, Sloane Street, Hans Place, and, much later, the Sloane Ranger.
Now turn to the theatre. The present Royal Court building opened in 1888, but its great moment came on 8 May 1956, when a young company led by George Devine staged Look Back in Anger by an unknown actor called John Osborne. Instead of drawing rooms and French windows, audiences saw an ironing board, a cramped attic flat and a furious young man ranting at post-war Britain. Critics were split, but the play changed British drama overnight, and the newspapers named a whole generation the Angry Young Men. Later, in 1973, a small studio upstairs gave the world the first performances of The Rocky Horror Show.
And here is something almost nobody notices. Under your feet, a lost London river, the Westbourne, flows through the square on its way to the Thames. When the Underground station was built, the engineers could not move the river, so they carried it over the platforms in a great iron pipe... and it is still there, above the trains.
The fountain was unveiled in 1953, the year of the coronation, by a sculptor called Gilbert Ledward, and it sits above that buried river like a little joke. Now leave the square heading south down Lower Sloane Street, and follow the signs towards the Royal Hospital and its great green gardens.