Escorts in Leicester Square, WC2H: who is close, and how soon
Leicester Square is named after a house that has not stood for more than two hundred years. Leicester House was built in the 1630s for Robert Sidney, second Earl of Leicester, on open ground then called Leicester Fields; the fields became a square of houses later in the seventeenth century, and the house came down in the 1790s. Nearly everything a visitor sees today went up after 1870, which makes the square a short course in how London built for crowds: a Victorian garden, music hall sites, a black granite tower of the 1930s and a church hidden inside a rotunda. Leicester Square escorts meet guests in the middle of all of it.
Nobody on the board gives WC2H as home. Three live in Soho on one side and three in Covent Garden on the other, so the office keeps its ordinary central timing for escorts in Leicester Square, about an hour once it has confirmed and more when the theatre crowds and the rush hour meet, with her exact time sent in the chat and each length on the rates. The buildings come next, one at a time, as you meet them on the way in.
On the ground
Leicester Square in practice
Landmarks on the arrival slip
By postcode, never by nameWC2H 7DX, W1D 7DT, WC2N 4HX, WC2H 9HB, W1B 4DY.
Nearest stations
Walking timeLeicester Square, 1 minute. Piccadilly Circus, 3 minutes. Charing Cross, 4 minutes.
Getting there
WC2HTravel is included across Zones 1 and 2, and counted from the moment the hour is set rather than from when she leaves.
On the board
Nearest prints to Leicester Square
Who works here
On the board in Leicester Square
The eight prints above are a first shortlist for Leicester Square tonight. Any of the twenty eight on the who is free page can be asked for by name instead.
Note 02
Leicester House and the lost fields
The great house stood on the north side of the square. In the eighteenth century it was home to Princes of Wales, first the future George II and later his son Frederick, and for a time the house served as a rival court to the king's own. It was demolished in the 1790s, and nothing of it survives above ground. What remains is the shape it left behind: an open rectangle of ground in a district of narrow streets, which is why the square still reads as a clearing rather than a street.
Note 03
The garden Albert Grant gave away
By the middle of the nineteenth century the garden was a derelict enclosure. In 1874 the financier Albert Grant bought it and gave it to the public, and James Knowles laid it out afresh around a single centrepiece: a marble Shakespeare standing over a fountain, copied from the monument designed by William Kent in Westminster Abbey. The pose is the same, the poet leaning on a pile of books and pointing to a scroll, and every later change to the square has kept him at the centre.
Note 04
Four neighbours on pedestals, and Chaplin
Busts in the garden honour four famous residents of the square or the streets beside it: the painter William Hogarth, the portraitist Joshua Reynolds, the surgeon John Hunter and Isaac Newton. They are the clearest reminder that this was once a good address, before the theatres came. A bronze Charlie Chaplin, put up in 1981, stands among them in his bowler hat.
The ground itself is new. The square was relaid in the early 2010s with granite paving, new stone benches and new lighting, and the plane trees were kept, so the Victorian plan now sits inside a crisp modern frame.
Note 05
Black granite on the east side
The strongest single building here is the cinema on the east side, opened in 1937 behind a facade of polished black granite with a tall, plain tower above it. It is one of the landmark Art Deco buildings in London and was built to be seen from across the square, which is still the best place to look at it: from the Shakespeare fountain the tower closes the view east.
The north side holds another large cinema, on the site of the Empire, a music hall that opened in 1884. The square has been a place of spectacle ever since, first variety and then film, and its frontages were built to advertise rather than to hide.
Note 06
A chariot above Cranbourn Street
On the corner of Cranbourn Street and Charing Cross Road stands the Hippodrome, designed by Frank Matcham and opened in 1900 as a hall for circus and water spectacles. Look up: a chariot drawn by rearing horses rides along its roofline. Nearby is the oxblood glazed terracotta front of Leicester Square station, one of Leslie Green's designs for the tube lines that opened in 1906 and 1907, with the arched upper windows most stations of that family share.
Note 07
A round church on Leicester Place
Leicester Place, a narrow street off the north side, hides the most surprising interior nearby. Notre Dame de France was built in the 1860s inside a rotunda that had housed a panorama, a huge circular painting viewed from the centre. Bombs damaged it in 1940, and the church was rebuilt in the 1950s keeping the round plan behind a plain modern front. Inside a side chapel are murals Jean Cocteau painted in 1960, drawn in fine lines and signed with his self portrait.
Note 08
Victorian shopfronts toward St Martin's Lane
East of the square, Cecil Court runs between Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane: a pedestrian court of matching Victorian shopfronts, long known for its booksellers and print dealers. A plaque records that the young Mozart lodged here in 1764. It is the quietest piece of Victorian building near the square, and the best reason to walk a little way before dinner. Chinatown, with its gates and lanterns, lies on the other side, just north of the square.
From The Roundup
Two notes worth reading for Leicester Square
Asked most often
Leicester Square, asked and answered
When did Leicester Square become a public garden?
Whose busts stand in the garden?
Is the Shakespeare statue an original?
What is on the roof of the Hippodrome?
Why is the church on Leicester Place round?
Where does the dark red tiling on the station come from?
One zone either way
Next along from Leicester Square
Last strip
Say a name and an hour
Write in with a length, a time and the zone you are staying in, and a name from the board comes back with a window attached. That is the whole of the arrangement.