Seven Dials, London

Seven Dials is a small road junction in Covent Garden in the West End of London where seven streets converge. At the centre of the roughly circular space is a column bearing six sundials, a result of the column being commissioned before a late-stage alteration of the plans from an original six roads to seven.

The term also refers informally to the immediate surrounding area.

The landed estate formally belonged to the Worshipful Company of Mercers which allowed building licences on what was open farmland to maximise their income in what was the burgeoning West End of the developing metropolitan area. The original layout of the Seven Dials area was designed by Thomas Neale in the early 1690s. The original plan had six roads converging, although this 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 maximise 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 well-off residents. This was not to be and the area gradually deteriorated. At one stage, each of the seven apexes facing the column housed a pub. By the 19th century, Seven Dials was among the most notorious slums in London, as part of the rookery of St Giles. The area was described by Charles Dickens in his collection Sketches by Boz, which remarks,

The stranger who finds himself in the Dials for the first time...at the entrance of Seven obscure passages, uncertain which to take, will see enough around him to keep his curiosity awake for no inconsiderable time...

...
Wikipedia