A pedestrian square in London's West End
A statue of William Shakespeare has stood at the centre of Leicester Square since gardens were laid out there in 1874, marking ground that began as four acres enclosed by Robert Sidney in 1630, passed through royal exile, museum curiosities and a giant globe, and is now London's pedestrianized hub of cinemas and theatres.
A fenced garden grew into a royal refuge
Leicester Square is now a pedestrian square packed with cinemas and tourists at the center of London's West End. Four centuries ago, it was open ground.
In 1630, Robert Sidney, 2nd Earl of Leicester bought four acres here and built himself a grand brick house on the north side, called Leicester House, Westminster. Sidney fenced off the land in front of it. The parish of St Martin in the Fields objected. They had used this ground as common land, and they complained to King Charles I. The king sided partly with them, ordering Sidney to keep some of it open for public use. That compromise became the square.
The house stayed in the family. Sidney's descendants let out small shops in booths along its front by the end of the 1600s, the first retail creeping into a once-private garden. The square itself was laid out properly in the 1670s, ringed with fashionable townhouses built to match nearby Pall Mall.
The house drew royalty more than once. In 1662, the exiled Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, former Queen of Bohemia, moved in during February. Elizabeth Stuart died there just five days later and was buried at Westminster Abbey.
Decades on, the house became a refuge for a different kind of royal exile. Prince George, heir to King George I, fell out badly with his father and moved into Leicester House in 1717. Prince George lived there through the rift, and in 1727, standing at its gates, he was proclaimed King George II.
A second prince quarreled with his father here
History repeated itself a generation later. Frederick, Prince of Wales, King George II's own son, fell out with his father just as George II had fallen out with his. Frederick leased Leicester House in 1742 and moved in. Frederick lived there until his death in 1751, making the house a second home for a royal family that kept quarreling itself into exile on this same patch of ground.
Reynolds, Hogarth and Hunter lived around this square
Through the mid-1700s, Leicester Square was still a fashionable address. The painter Joshua Reynolds lived at No. 47 from 1760 until 1792, and William Hogarth worked at No. 30 for three decades, painting Gin Lane and A Rake's Progress there. The surgeon John Hunter took No. 24 in 1783 and stayed until his death a decade later.
The house itself changed hands and changed purpose. Philip Sidney, 3rd Earl of Leicester, allowed small shops to open in booths along its front, late in the 1600s. By 1774, the naturalist Ashton Lever leased the building outright and filled it with his collection of 25,000 natural history specimens, calling it the Leverian Museum. For fourteen years, visitors paid to see birds, fossils and shells crowded into the rooms where kings had once lived.
Leicester House came down for streets and a museum
The Sidney line had run out. Leicester House was demolished in 1791 and 1792, and the estate was carved up into new streets: Leicester Place, Leicester Street, Lisle Street and Sidney Street. The government bought Lever's collection in 1799. It became the seed of the Hunterian Museum, named for the same John Hunter who had lived on the square.
A rotunda went up on the old house's footprint in 1793 and 1794, opening as a panorama theater. It later became Burford's Panorama, a popular sight through the first half of the 1800s, showing painted scenes of cities and battles to paying crowds.
Brothels and a giant globe filled the garden
The square turned rougher as the century went on. Brothels opened nearby. Visitors paid to watch the severed heads of executed traitors through a telescope. A statue of George I on horseback had stood at the center since 1747, growing shabbier as the garden around it fell into neglect under a tangle of changing owners. The Tulk family bought most of the estate in 1808 and held it for decades.
Entertainment filled the gap left by the vanished aristocracy. Mary Linwood displayed her needlework at the old Savile House from 1809 until her death in 1845. William Green ran a shooting gallery upstairs in the same building from 1836 to 1855. In 1851, James Wyld built a giant globe in the square's center, a hollow sphere you could walk inside to see a map of the world modeled on its interior walls. It stood for just over a decade before being dismantled and sold for scrap in 1862.
Shakespeare's statue became the square's new centre
The square was finally restored under new direction in 1874. Albert Grant funded proper gardens, with a statue of Shakespeare at the center, ringed by busts of Isaac Newton, Joshua Reynolds, John Hunter and William Hogarth, honoring the square's old residents. The Empire Theatre opened in 1884, and the Odeon rose in 1937 on the site of the old Alhambra theater.
Traffic gave way to a pedestrian plaza
The square was pedestrianized in the 1980s, closing it to traffic and shaping the open plaza seen today. The Odeon underwent a major refurbishment in 2018, and a 2016 development reshaped the building on the square's west side into LSQ London.
Leicester Square today is a paved plaza ringed by cinemas, with Shakespeare's statue still standing where Robert Sidney, 2nd Earl of Leicester and George II once lived.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.