Piccadilly Circus
Piccadilly Circus is a road junction and public space of London's West End in the City of Westminster. It was built in 1819 to connect Regent Street with Piccadilly. In this context, a circus, from the Latin word meaning "circle", is a round open space at a street junction.
The Circus now connects Piccadilly, Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, the Haymarket, Coventry Street and Glasshouse Street. It is close to major shopping and entertainment areas in the West End. Its status as a major traffic junction has made Piccadilly Circus a busy meeting place and a tourist attraction in its own right. The Circus is particularly known for its video display and neon signs mounted on the corner building on the northern side, as well as the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain and statue of Anteros.
It is surrounded by several notable buildings, including the London Pavilion and Criterion Theatre. Underneath the plaza is Piccadilly Circus tube station, part of the London Underground system.
History
Piccadilly Circus connects to Piccadilly, a thoroughfare whose name first appeared in 1626 as Piccadilly Hall, named after a house belonging to one Robert Baker, a tailor famous for selling piccadills, or piccadillies, a term used for various kinds of collars. The street was known as Portugal Street in 1692 in honour of Catherine of Braganza, the queen consort of King Charles II but was known as Piccadilly by 1743. Piccadilly Circus was created in 1819, at the junction with Regent Street, which was then being built under the planning of John Nash on the site of a house and garden belonging to a Lady Hutton; the intersection was then known as Regent Circus South and it did not begin to be known as Piccadilly Circus until the mid-1880s, with the rebuilding of the Regent Street Quadrant and the construction of Shaftesbury Avenue. In the same period the circus lost its circular form.File:Piccadillycircus1896.gif|left|thumb|Piccadilly Circus in 1896, with a view towards Leicester Square via Coventry Street. London Pavilion is on the left, and Criterion Theatre on the right.
The junction has been a very busy traffic interchange since construction, as it lies at the centre of Theatreland and handles exit traffic from Piccadilly, which Charles Dickens Jr. described in 1879: "Piccadilly, the great thoroughfare leading from the Haymarket and Regent-street westward to Hyde Park-corner, is the nearest approach to the Parisian boulevard of which London can boast."
Piccadilly Circus tube station was opened on 10 March 1906, on the Bakerloo line, and on the Piccadilly line in December of that year. In 1928, the station was extensively rebuilt to handle an increase in traffic. The junction's first electric advertisements appeared in 1908, and, from 1923, electric billboards were set up on the facade of the London Pavilion. Electric street lamps, however, did not replace the gas ones until 1932. The circus became a one-way roundabout on 19 July 1926. Traffic lights were first installed on 3 August 1926.
During World War II many servicemen's clubs in the West End served American soldiers based in Britain. So many prostitutes roamed the area approaching the soldiers that they received the nickname "Piccadilly Commandos", and both Scotland Yard and the Foreign Office discussed possible damage to Anglo-American relations.
At the start of the 1960s, it was determined that the Circus needed to be redeveloped to allow for greater traffic flow. In 1962, Lord Holford presented a plan which would have created a "double-decker" Piccadilly Circus; the upper deck would have been an elevated pedestrian concourse linking the buildings around the perimeter of the Circus, with the lower deck being solely for traffic, most of the ground-level pedestrian areas having been removed to allow for greater vehicle flow. This concept was kept alive throughout the rest of the 1960s. A final scheme in 1972 proposed three octagonal towers to replace the Trocadero, the Criterion and the "Monico" buildings. The plans were permanently rejected by Sir Keith Joseph and Ernest Marples; the key reason given was that Holford's scheme only allowed for a 20% increase in traffic, and the Government required 50%.
The Holford plan is referenced in the short-form documentary film "Goodbye, Piccadilly", produced by the Rank Organisation in 1967 as part of their Look at Life series when it was still seriously expected that Holford's recommendations would be acted upon. Piccadilly Circus has since escaped major redevelopment, apart from extensive ground-level pedestrianisation around its south side in the 1980s.
The Circus has been targeted by Irish republican terrorists multiple times. On 24 June 1939 an explosion occurred, although no injuries were caused. On 25 November 1974 a bomb injured 16 people. A 2 lb bomb exploded on 6 October 1992, injuring five people.
The Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain at Piccadilly Circus was erected in 1893 to commemorate the philanthropic works of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. It was removed from the Circus twice and moved from the centre once. The first time was in 1922, so that Charles Holden's new tube station could be built directly below it. The fountain returned in 1931. During the Second World War, the fountain was removed for the second time and replaced by advertising hoardings. It was returned again in 1948. When the Circus underwent reconstruction work in the late 1980s, the entire fountain was moved from the centre of the junction at the beginning of Shaftesbury Avenue to its present position at the southwestern corner.
Location and sights
Piccadilly Circus is surrounded by tourist attractions, including the Shaftesbury Memorial, Criterion Theatre, London Pavilion and retail stores. Nightclubs, restaurants and bars are located in the area and neighbouring Soho, including the former Chinawhite club.File:Piccadilly Circus Dawn BLS.jpg|thumb|center|800px|Panorama of Piccadilly Circus in 2015 from the southern side in front of Lillywhites
Illuminated signs
Piccadilly Circus was surrounded by illuminated advertising hoardings on buildings, starting in 1908 with a Perrier sign, but only one building now carries them, the one in the northwestern corner between Shaftesbury Avenue and Glasshouse Street. The site is unnamed ; its addresses are 44/48 Regent Street, 1/6 Sherwood Street, 17/22 Denman Street and 1/17 Shaftesbury Avenue, and it has been owned by property investor Land Securities Group since the 1970s.The earliest signs used incandescent light bulbs; these were replaced with neon lights and with moving signs. The first neon sign was for the British meat extract Bovril. From December 1998, digital projectors were used for the Coke sign, the square's first digital billboard, while in the 2000s there was a gradual move to LED displays, which completely replaced neon lamps by 2011. The number of signs has reduced over the years as the rental costs have increased, and in January 2017 the six remaining advertising screens were switched off as part of their combination into one large ultra-high definition curved Daktronics display, turning the signs off during renovation for the longest time since the 1940s. On 26 October 2017, the new screen was switched on for the first time.
File:International Piccadilly- Overseas Troops in London, 1942 D9794.jpg|thumb|upright|Guinness advertisement with their slogan, "Guinness is good for you", at Piccadilly Circus in 1942. The Bovril sign was installed in 1910.
Until the 2017 refurbishment, the site had six LED advertising screens above three large retail units facing Piccadilly Circus on the north side, occupied by Boots, Gap and a mix of smaller retail, restaurant and office premises fronting the other streets. A Burger King located under the Samsung advert, which had been a Wimpy Bar until 1989, closed in early 2008 and was converted into a Barclays bank.
- Coca-Cola has had a sign at Piccadilly Circus since 1954. In September 2003, the previous digital projector board and the site that had been occupied by Nescafé was replaced with a state-of-the-art LED video display that curves round with the building. Before Nescafé, a neon advertisement for Foster's occupied the spot from 1987 until 1999, and from 1978 to 1987 it was used by Philips Electronics. For several months in 2002, the Nescafé sign was replaced by a sign featuring the quote "Imagine all the people living life in peace" by former Beatle John Lennon. This was paid for by his widow Yoko Ono, who spent an estimated £150,000 to display an advert at this location. Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Coca-Cola Zero, Fanta, Sprite and Vitamin Water have all been advertised in the space.
- Hyundai Motors sign launched on 29 September 2011. It replaced a sign for Sanyo which had occupied the space since around early 1988, the last to be run using neon lights rather than Hyundai's computerised LED screen. Earlier Sanyo signs with older logos had occupied the position since 1978, although these were only half the size of the later space.
- McDonald's added its sign in 1987, replacing one for BASF. The sign was changed from neon to LED in 2001. A bigger, brighter screen was installed by Daktronics in 2008.
- Samsung added its sign in November 1994, the space having been previously occupied by Canon Inc. and Panasonic. The sign was changed from neon to LED in summer 2005. The screen was upgraded and improved in autumn 2011.
- L'Oreal, Hunter Original and eBay both had signs in the Piccadilly circus billboards since October 2017.
- One Piccadilly, the highest resolution of all the LED displays was installed by Daktronics, in late 2013, underneath the Samsung and McDonald's signs. It allowed other companies to advertise for both short- and long-term leases, increasing the amount of advertising space but using the same screen for multiple brands. Prior to this an earlier, smaller LED screen called Piccadilly Lite occupied the space from 3 December 2007 to 2013. The space has also been occupied by JVC, Carlsberg and Budweiser.
- The Curve, a similar space to One Piccadilly, was added in 2015, replacing a space previously occupied by Schweppes, BP, Cinzano, Fujifilm, Kodak and TDK. Burberry was using the space as of December 2015.
- LG was added in February 2007 on the roof of Coventry House, which diagonally faces Piccadilly Circus. Its sign is a large LED video advertising display for LGE, the British arm of the South Korean electronics group. The new display also incorporates a scrolling ticker of Sky News headlines. Before LG, Vodafone had a neon sign installed on that spot, which displayed both its logo and personal messages that could be submitted on a special website and displayed at a certain time and date.
Other companies and brands that have had signs on the site were Bovril, Volkswagen, Max Factor, Wrigley's Spearmint, Skol, Air India and Gold Flake.
Since 2020, the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Arts has broadcast specially commissioned two-minute artworks for the screens, broadcast at the same time each evening. In 2022 the segments were shown at 8:22 p.m.