Short’s Gardens

Short’s Gardens. . , Seven Dials is one of the many creations of Thomas Neale MP (1641-1699) 'The Great Projector'. Neale was one of the most influential figures of late Stuart England: an MP for 30 years serving on 62 parliamentary committees; Master of the Mint and the Transfer Office and Groom Porter under three kings; gambler, entrepreneur and husband to two of England's richest widows. William III granted him the freehold of the land, then known as Marshland or Cock and Pye Fields, in return for favours. Neale raised over £1m for the Crown via England's first lottery., Plans for a building licence were submitted to the Surveyor-General Sir Christopher Wren in 1692 and showed six streets, at least 316 houses and an estate church. Neale cheated by adding a street and failing to build the church. The unique star-shaped layout maximised income as rents were charged by frontage. From the outset, Neale planned for Seven Dials to be a mix of residential, retail and crafts, very different from the fashionable, purely residential London squares of his day., Today Seven Dials stands as the only quarter of London remaining from late Stuart England its layout remains unaltered and many of the original houses remain, mostly re-faced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To the south, the massive buildings of the Woodyard Brewery remain, unique in London's West End., Short's Gardens from The Dials to Neal Street (formerly Queen Street) , On either side of what is now Short's Gardens lay the cultivated grounds of William Short, gardener of Gray's Inn who, in 1590, purchased fields known as Newland between Drury Lane and the Marshland. The Short family were prominent parishioners of St Giles until Thomas Short sold the property around 1690 and it became part of Thomas Neale's Seven Dials development., Today, only the part of the street nearest The Dials retains the original seventeenth-century domestic architectural scale and character, with Nos 1, 2,4 and 6 still occupying the original building plots. Nos. 5-11 were the site of a long-standing lodging house, Tom Farmer's, better known as 'The Kip'. Here, until the end of the nineteenth century, residents slept sitting down leaning on a rope which was untied at dawn. Troublesome customers were thrown out and tied to a barrow to await a policeman to wheel them to Bow Street police station. It remained a lodging house until the 1920s. Poverty was rife in Seven Dials and the far end of Short's Gardens, crossing Endell Street, was the site of the notorious St Giles Workhouse. Opened in 1725, it housed up to 900 paupers. The establishment continued into the early twentieth century. In 1915, the buildings were converted into a Military Hospital staffed entirely by women doctors and medical staff., The south side of the street is largely taken up by Thomas Neal's shopping centre (the final 'e' on Neale being optional in the variable spelling of the time). This encompasses the stable buildings of the nearby Woodyard Brewery, erected in 1880. Within Thomas Neal's is Cucumber Alley, a reconstruction of a passageway shown on Rocque's map of 1745, later known as Neal's Passage, until obliterated by warehouses in the 1870s. It was here in 1989 that the northernmost evidence of Saxon- London (Lundenwic) was found: remains dating from the mid-eighth century, including traces of wattle-and-daub houses and evidence of iron-working., Neal's Yard , Originally King's Head Court, Neal's Yard had received its present name by 1745. The Seven Dials Ragged Night School opened in the Yard in 1847 attracting 60 destitute boys on its first evening. Until the 1970s Neal's Yard was connected with the activities of Covent Garden Fruit and Vegetable Market and included premises for wheelwrights and packing-case manufacturers. Alternative entrepreneur Nicholas Saunders (1938-98) bought No.2, former banana store, in 1976 and went on to establish the Yard as a centre for specialist enterprises including a wholefood warehouse, coffee shop, bakery, dairy, therapy rooms and apothecary. In the 1980s, Monty Python's Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam had studios and a film editing suite there, bearing a provocative hanging sign, 'Neal's Yard Abattoir'. ,