in
Dickens'
Sketches by Boz. In the Middle Ages, the area was owned by the monastic hospital of St Giles which specialised in treating lepers, but it was expropriated by Henry VIII in 1537 and later passed into private hands. In the 17th century, a local estate known as Cock and Pye Fields belonged to the
Worshipful Company of Mercers, which, to maximise its income in the burgeoning West End, allowed building licences on what until then was open farmland near the developing metropolitan area. The original layout of the Seven Dials area was designed by
Thomas Neale during the early 1690s. His plan had six roads converging, although this number was later increased to seven. The sundial column was built with only six faces, with the column itself acting as the
gnomon of the seventh dial. This layout was chosen to produce triangular plots, in order to minimise the frontage of houses to be built on the site, as rentals were charged per foot of frontage rather than by the square footage of properties. After the successful development of the Covent Garden Piazza area nearby, Neale hoped that Seven Dials would be popular with wealthy residents. This was not to be, and the status of the area gradually went down. By the 19th century, Seven Dials was among the most notorious
slums in London, as part of the slum of St Giles. The area was described by
Charles Dickens in 1835: In his collection
Sketches by Boz, Dickens remarks, The relatively low status of the location is also stated by
W. S. Gilbert in the operetta
Iolanthe It remained a byword for urban poverty during the early 20th century, when
Agatha Christie set
The Seven Dials Mystery (1929) there. The original sundial column was removed in 1773. It was long believed that it had been pulled down by an angry mob, but recent research suggests it was deliberately removed by the Paving Commissioners in an attempt to rid the area of "undesirables". The remains were acquired by architect
James Paine, who kept them at his house in
Addlestone,
Surrey, from where they were bought in 1820 by public subscription and re-erected in nearby
Weybridge as a memorial to
Princess Frederica Charlotte of Prussia, Duchess of York and Albany. It is now known as the
York Column. The badly weathered dialstone was not reinstalled on the monument and can be seen adjacent to Weybridge Library. During the 1840s Seven Dials was a major gathering area for the
Chartists in their campaign for electoral reform. However, the illegal activities of some (plans for armed uprisings) were thwarted by the recently established police force. By 1851 sewers were laid in the area, but poverty intensified in St Giles and in the Seven Dials, although the population began to decrease as workshops and breweries started occupying some of the houses. The model developed by
Margaret Frere was established here to support poor children in education; it was adopted throughout London for
school social work. The seven streets at Seven Dials originally had quite different names from what they have now. They were Great Earl Street, Little Earl Street, Great White Lion Street, Little White Lion Street, Great St Andrew's Street, Little St Andrew's Street and Queen Street. In the 1930s, their names were changed: Great and Little Earl Streets became
Earlham Street, Great and Little White Lion Streets became part of an extended
Mercer Street, Great and Little St Andrew's Streets became
Monmouth Street, and Queen Street became
Shorts Gardens. Today, only two houses remain from the original Thomas Neale development of the 1690s; 61 Monmouth Street and 64 Neal Street. ==History, after 1973==