Charlotte Street: The Continental Bohemian Corridor

Why is it significant?

Stroll along the lively pavements of Charlotte Street, where sidewalk tables and canvas awnings lend a distinctly Mediterranean air to this quiet London enclave.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stroll along the lively pavements of Charlotte Street, where sidewalk tables and canvas awnings lend a distinctly Mediterranean air to this quiet London enclave. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Charlotte Street served as the social backbone of Fitzrovia, welcoming political refugees fleeing continental crackdowns, from French communards of eighteen seventy-one to anarchist thinkers and avant-garde painters associated with the London Group.

John Constable, England's supreme landscape painter, lived and maintained his main London studio at number seventy-six Charlotte Street from eighteen twenty-two until his death, painting luminous cloud studies and oil sketches of the British countryside far from the noisy streets outside.

In the nineteen thirties and forties, Greek and Italian restaurants on this street became legendary bohemian salons where George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and painter Walter Sickert shared cheap bottles of red wine and argued about politics while escaping the stuffy orthodoxy of West End clubs.

Turn the corner onto Windmill Street to reach the historic public house that gave this entire neighborhood its famous name.