Curtain Up: London's West End Theatreland, from the Savoy to Covent Garden and Leicester Square

Electric light at the Savoy, a ghost at Drury Lane, Mr Punch under Inigo Jones's portico and the play that has outlived everyone who first saw it

London · 12 stops · 29 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Savoy Court & the Savoy Theatre

   Savoy Court, Strand, London WC2R 0ET, United Kingdom

   Stand at the mouth of Savoy Court, the short cul-de-sac running off the Strand, and watch the taxis for a moment. Something is wrong... they are driving on the right. This tiny street is said to be the only road in Britain where traffic keeps to the right, and the usual explanation is wonderfully practical: it lets cabs pull up with their passengers' doors facing the entrances of the hotel and the theatre.

   Above the hotel entrance stands a small statue of a knight in armour. That is Count Peter of Savoy, uncle of Henry III's queen, who was given this land by the river in 1246 and built a palace here. Later it belonged to John of Gaunt, and rebels burned it to the ground in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The palace has been gone for more than six hundred years, but the name has never left.

   On your right is the Savoy Theatre. It was built in 1881 by the impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte as a home for the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and it was the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electricity. Audiences were nervous about the new lamps, so Carte walked out on stage, wrapped a glowing bulb in muslin and smashed it, to show that nothing would catch fire. The cloth did not even scorch, and the audience burst into applause.

   The profits of HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado paid for the Savoy hotel next door, which opened in 1889 with electric lifts and an astonishing number of bathrooms for the time. Claude Monet painted the misty Thames from his room upstairs. And the hotel still keeps a carved black cat called Kaspar, who is given a seat at any dinner party that would otherwise sit down thirteen at table.

   The theatre burned in 1990 and was restored to its glittering art deco look of 1929, all silver and gold. So theatreland begins with light, with superstition and with a little bit of showing off. Walk west along the Strand, turn right up Southampton Street, and then left into narrow Maiden Lane, where the oldest restaurant in London is waiting.

2. 2. Rules & Maiden Lane

   34-35 Maiden Lane, London WC2E 7LB, United Kingdom

   Walk along Maiden Lane until you reach a long frontage with gold lettering and lace in the windows. This is Rules, opened in 1798 by Thomas Rule, and it is the oldest restaurant in London. Through the glass you may glimpse walls crowded with cartoons, playbills and portraits of actors, and a menu that still leans towards game, oysters and puddings.

   The story goes that young Thomas Rule had been something of a wastrel, and promised his family he would mend his ways if they set him up in business... so he opened an oyster bar. Over two centuries it became a second home for writers and performers. Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray are said to have eaten here, and later Graham Greene and John Betjeman, while actors from the surrounding theatres came in after the curtain, still wearing traces of their make-up.

   The most famous tale is about Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, and his lover, the actress Lillie Langtry. Legend says they dined together upstairs, and that a private door was made so the prince could arrive and leave without walking through the restaurant. Nobody has ever proved it, and nobody at Rules is in any hurry to disprove it.

   Maiden Lane has a darker theatre story too. A few steps along is the back entrance of the Adelphi Theatre, and on 16 December 1897 the hugely popular actor William Terriss was stabbed to death there by a mentally ill fellow actor who believed Terriss had blocked his career. Theatre folk say his ghost still wanders, and some swear they have seen a figure in old-fashioned clothes in Covent Garden Underground station. And here is a gentler fact: in 1775 the painter J. M. W. Turner was born in this lane, the son of a barber.

   Restaurants, ghosts and painters, all in one narrow lane. Now walk back to Southampton Street, turn left, and follow it up into the great open square, then turn to face the tall columns of the church on its western side.

3. 3. Covent Garden Piazza & St Paul's, the Actors' Church

   Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ED, United Kingdom

   Stand in the open square and face the great columned portico of St Paul's Church on its western side. You are in London's first planned public square, laid out in the 1630s by Inigo Jones for the Earl of Bedford, and inspired by the arcaded piazzas Jones had seen in Italy. Street performers have been drawing crowds on these cobbles for centuries.

   The name is older than the square. This was the convent garden, the kitchen garden of the monks of Westminster Abbey, until Henry VIII took it and it passed to the Russell family, the Earls of Bedford. The story goes that the earl asked Jones for a cheap church, saying something not much better than a barn would do, and Jones replied that he would have the handsomest barn in England. And here is the joke of that portico the door inside it is a fake. The altar is on this side, so the real entrance is at the back, through the quiet churchyard garden off Bedford Street.

   On 9 May 1662 Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he had watched an Italian puppet play here, under the portico. It is the first recorded performance in England of the puppet who became Mr Punch, and every May puppeteers still gather to celebrate his birthday. Two and a half centuries later, George Bernard Shaw set the opening of Pygmalion right here, with Eliza Doolittle selling flowers to theatregoers sheltering from the rain, the scene that later became My Fair Lady.

   For three hundred years this square was London's great fruit, vegetable and flower market, until the traders moved out to Nine Elms in 1974. Inside the church, they call it the Actors' Church. Its walls are lined with memorials to performers, Charlie Chaplin, Vivien Leigh and Boris Karloff among them, and the ashes of the great Victorian actress Ellen Terry rest there in a casket.

   So the actors' parish church sits right in the middle of the square where English street theatre was born. Now cross the piazza to its north-east corner, where the iron and glass of the opera house's Floral Hall rise above the arcade, and go round onto Bow Street.

4. 4. Royal Opera House & Bow Street

   Bow Street, London WC2E 9DD, United Kingdom

   On Bow Street, step back far enough to take in the pale columns of the Royal Opera House, with the great arched iron and glass of the Floral Hall beside it. This is the third theatre on this spot, and every one of them has been at the centre of London's musical life.

   The first opened in 1732, and it was paid for by a hit. The manager John Rich had staged John Gay's The Beggar's Opera a few years earlier, a rowdy show about thieves and highwaymen that ran and ran. London wits said it had made Gay rich, and Rich gay. With the money, Rich built a theatre here, and soon George Frideric Handel was premiering his operas and oratorios on its stage, playing organ concertos between the acts. The first London performance of Messiah took place in this theatre in 1743.

   The building burned in 1808, and when the new one opened a year later with higher ticket prices, the audience rebelled. For more than two months, crowds came every night to shout, sing, blow horns and wave placards demanding the old prices, until the management gave in. History calls them the Old Price Riots. After a second fire in 1856, the present theatre opened in 1858.

   It has had some unlikely lives. During the First World War it was used as a furniture store, and during the Second World War as a dance hall, with servicemen jiving where sopranos had died of consumption. Since 1946 it has been home to the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet, and it was here that Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev formed one of the most celebrated partnerships in the history of dance.

   Across the road stands the former Bow Street Magistrates' Court, the home of the Bow Street Runners, an early force of thief-takers, and the court where Oscar Wilde was charged in 1895. Music on one side of the street, justice on the other. Walk to the bottom of Bow Street, turn left into Russell Street, and follow the long colonnade to the portico of the Theatre Royal.

5. 5. Theatre Royal Drury Lane: The Man in Grey

   Catherine Street, London WC2B 5JF, United Kingdom

   Follow the colonnade along Russell Street round to the grand portico on Catherine Street. This is the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and there has been a theatre on this site since 1663, which makes it the oldest theatre site in London still in use.

   In 1660 the monarchy came back, and with Charles II came the theatres, closed for eighteen years by the Puritans. The king gave royal patents to just two companies, and one of them, under Thomas Killigrew, opened here. For the first time women appeared on the English stage, and one of them was Nell Gwyn, who started out selling oranges to the audience and ended up as the king's mistress. The building you see is the fourth on the site, opened in 1812.

   Its predecessor burned in 1809, when the owner was the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The story goes that he sat in a coffee house across the street with a glass of wine, watching his fortune go up in flames, and when friends marvelled at his calm, he answered that surely a man may take a glass of wine by his own fireside. Inside there are two royal boxes, and legend says that is because George III and his son, the Prince of Wales, quarrelled so badly in the foyer that they had to be kept apart for ever after.

   And then there is the Man in Grey. For generations, actors and staff have reported a figure in a long grey cloak, powdered wig and three-cornered hat, walking along the back of the upper circle in broad daylight, and vanishing into the wall. Legend connects him with a skeleton, a dagger in its ribs, said to have been found bricked up in a passage in the nineteenth century. Actors are pleased to see him: the tradition says that a sighting before an opening night means a hit.

   There is a gentler tradition too. Every year on Twelfth Night, the company shares a cake paid for by the will of an eighteenth-century actor, Robert Baddeley. Now walk back along Russell Street, turn right up Bow Street, then left into Floral Street, under the twisting glass bridge of the Royal Ballet School, and on to a narrow alley called Rose Street.

6. 6. Lamb & Flag: Dryden's Alley

   33 Rose Street, London WC2E 9EB, United Kingdom

   Squeeze into Rose Street, a narrow alley that bends between old brick walls, and you come to a little pub with small-paned windows and a timber front: the Lamb and Flag. On a warm evening the drinkers spill out into the alley, pint glasses in hand, exactly as they have for centuries.

   There has been a tavern here since at least the eighteenth century, and Rose Street was once a much rougher place than the polished Covent Garden around it today. The story goes that bare-knuckle prize fights were staged in and around the pub, and that it earned the nickname the Bucket of Blood. Treat that one with a pinch of salt... but the alley has at least one real assault on its record.

   On the night of 18 December 1679, the poet John Dryden was walking home through Rose Street when a gang of men set upon him and beat him with cudgels. Dryden was the most famous writer in England, Poet Laureate and a playwright for the King's Company at Drury Lane, and London quickly decided who was to blame. A vicious satire had been going around mocking powerful courtiers, and it was widely believed that Dryden had written it. Suspicion fell on John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, the wildest rake of Charles II's court. Nobody was ever convicted, and the satire was probably by someone else altogether. A plaque on the pub remembers the attack.

   Dryden was the king of the theatre world of his day. Just round the corner, at Will's Coffee House on Russell Street, he held court every afternoon, with his own chair kept by the fire in winter and on the balcony in summer, and young writers crowded in hoping for a word. Restoration London was small: playhouse, coffee house, tavern and alley were all a few minutes apart, and gossip moved faster than any of them.

   Theatre has always been a dangerous business, it seems, especially for critics and satirists. Now walk to the top of Rose Street, cross Long Acre, and take Mercer Street north to a meeting of seven streets around a tall pillar.

7. 7. Seven Dials: The Pillar of Six Sundials

   Seven Dials, London WC2H 9HD, United Kingdom

   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.

8. 8. St Martin's Theatre: The Mousetrap

   West Street, London WC2H 9NZ, United Kingdom

   On West Street two small theatres stand shoulder to shoulder: the Ambassadors and, next to it, the St Martin's, with a sign announcing a show that has been playing in London for more than seventy years. Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap.

   It began as a short radio play called Three Blind Mice, written in 1947 for the eightieth birthday of Queen Mary, who was a great fan of Christie's books. Christie expanded it for the stage, and on 6 October 1952 it opened at the Ambassadors, with Richard Attenborough and his wife Sheila Sim in the leading roles. Christie herself is said to have expected a run of a few months.

   In 1974, after more than twenty years, it simply moved next door to the larger St Martin's, without missing more than a weekend. It has been playing ever since, through decimalisation, the internet and more than a dozen prime ministers, well past twenty-five thousand performances. The only real interruption came in March 2020, when the pandemic closed every theatre in London, and it was back on stage in May 2021. It is the longest-running play in the world, and actors joke that it has outlived the original cast, the original critics and quite a few of its audience.

   Then there is the secret. At the end of every performance, the cast asks the audience not to reveal who the murderer is, and millions of people have kept that promise. Christie also insisted that no film version be made while the play runs in the West End. She gave the rights to her grandson as a present when he was a boy, which must make it one of the most generous birthday gifts in the history of the theatre.

   So if you ever want to buy a ticket for the oldest secret in London, this is the box office. Now keep going to the end of West Street and turn left onto Charing Cross Road, to the busy roundabout of Cambridge Circus and a red-brick palace of terracotta.

9. 9. Palace Theatre & Shaftesbury Avenue

   113 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 5AY, United Kingdom

   On the corner of Cambridge Circus rises a fantastic red-brick and terracotta building, all turrets, arches and striped stone, like a castle that has wandered into the West End. This is the Palace Theatre, and it was born out of a grand dream that failed.

   It was built by Richard D'Oyly Carte, the man you met at the Savoy. Flush with the success of Gilbert and Sullivan, he wanted to give London a serious English opera house, and in January 1891 it opened as the Royal English Opera House with Arthur Sullivan's grand opera Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe ran for a respectable season, but Carte had nothing to follow it with. Within a couple of years he had sold up, and the opera house became the Palace Theatre of Varieties, with music hall, dancers and, early on, moving pictures.

   Its great musical era came later. In 1985 Les Misérables transferred here from the Barbican after mixed reviews, and audiences ignored the critics, so it stayed for almost nineteen years before moving down the road. Since 2016 the stage has belonged to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play so long it was first performed in two parts. And the composer and actor Ivor Novello was starring here in his own musical, King's Rhapsody, when he died in 1951.

   Shaftesbury Avenue, which runs from here to Piccadilly Circus, was itself a piece of Victorian surgery. It was cut through some of the worst slums in London in the 1880s and named after the reforming Earl of Shaftesbury, and within twenty years it was lined with theatres. The famous winged statue at Piccadilly Circus that everyone calls Eros is in fact part of a memorial to the same earl.

   Now walk south-west down Shaftesbury Avenue, past the Lyric, the Apollo, the Gielgud and the Sondheim theatres, with their lights and posters, to Piccadilly Circus. Then turn left and walk down the hill of Haymarket, until two theatres face each other across the road.

10. 10. Haymarket: Theatre Royal & His Majesty's

    Haymarket, London SW1Y 4HT, United Kingdom

    Halfway down Haymarket, stop between two theatres that stare at each other across the traffic. On one side, six tall columns of John Nash's portico stride right over the pavement. On the other, a grand Victorian front with a dome on the corner.

    The first is the Theatre Royal Haymarket. A little playhouse opened on this street in 1720, and its royal patent came about in the strangest way. In 1766 the actor and comic writer Samuel Foote was goaded into riding a notoriously wild horse during a visit to the Duke of York, was thrown, and lost a leg. The story goes that the embarrassed duke made amends by securing Foote a royal patent for his theatre. The present building opened in 1821, and its staff will tell you that a nineteenth-century manager, John Buckstone, has never quite left: his ghost is said to be seen in the wings and in his old dressing room.

    Opposite stands His Majesty's Theatre. A theatre has stood here since 1705, when the architect and playwright John Vanbrugh opened the Queen's Theatre, and it became London's opera house. In 1711 George Frideric Handel's Rinaldo had its premiere on this site, the first Italian opera written specially for the London stage. The name changes with whoever is on the throne, Queen's, King's, Her Majesty's... and since the accession of Charles III it is His Majesty's once again.

    The present building was put up in 1897 by the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who in 1904 started an acting school in its dome. It grew into RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. And since 9 October 1986 the stage has belonged to Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, with its falling chandelier and its masked man in the cellars.

    A ghost on one side of the street and a phantom on the other, which seems fair for theatreland. Now walk back up to Panton Street, turn right, and follow it east to a leafy square full of cinemas, statues and ticket booths.

11. 11. Leicester Square: Premieres, Painters & Charlie Chaplin

    Leicester Square, London WC2H 7NA, United Kingdom

    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.

12. 12. London Coliseum: The Globe on St Martin's Lane

    St Martin's Lane, London WC2N 4ES, United Kingdom

    Look up at the tower of the London Coliseum on St Martin's Lane, where a great globe sits on top like a planet balanced on a wedding cake. At night it glows above the rooftops, a beacon for anyone hurrying to a show.

    The Coliseum opened in 1904, designed by Frank Matcham, the most prolific theatre architect of the age, for the impresario Oswald Stoll. Stoll wanted a people's palace of variety, with several shows a day, and Matcham gave him the largest theatre in London, with well over two thousand seats, and one of the first revolving stages in Britain, built so that horses and chariots could race on it.

    On this stage you might have seen almost anything: the great French tragedian Sarah Bernhardt in her later years, acrobats, comedians, performing animals... and, from 1918, Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, bringing the dancers of the Russian avant-garde to London audiences who had come in for a variety bill. Variety and high art sat side by side, sometimes on the same night.

    In 1968 the Sadler's Wells Opera moved in, and a few years later it became English National Opera, with a simple and still radical principle: opera sung in English, at prices that ordinary Londoners could afford. The building's vast auditorium, gilded and plushy, was made for exactly that kind of crowd.

    And that is the thread of this whole walk. You started at the Savoy, where electric light first filled a theatre, and you have passed Restoration actresses, Victorian ghosts, a puppet called Punch and a murderer whose name millions of people have kept secret. In London the theatre has always been for everyone, from royal boxes to the cheap seats. Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross station are only a minute away down St Martin's Lane... and somewhere nearby, the curtain is about to go up.