Seven Dials Covent Garden is a unique quarter of London whose star-shaped layout remains as constructed in the early 1690s. It was brought back to life largely through the dedication of the Seven Dials Trust, working in partnership with the local authorities and landowners for nearly forty years.

The reconstruction of the Sundial Pillar at Seven Dials was the first project of its kind in London since the erection of Nelson's Column in the 1840s. However, there is a fundamental difference between the Sundial Pillar and London's other great monuments - the Sundial Pillar performs a function: telling the time accurately on six dial faces. So our story isn't just about an imaginative solution to creating 60-foot deep foundations across a plethora of underground services and raising the funds to build it. It involved establishing the historic orientation of the sundials - the art of gnomonics, by which every sundial on the planet tells the apparent solar time specific to its location. Our astronomer had to calculate this for Seven Dials.

Our architect, A.D.Mason of Whitfield Partners, had to solve the riddle of Pierce's original 1693 drawing (found hidden away in the British Museum in a cupboard unopened for many years). The dimensions of the drawing did not match Pierce's handwritten notes and neither matched the remains of the original pillar now in Weybridge. A.D. Mason ended up with a 40-foot tall paper model. Trainee masons had to make the one-tonne dialstone absolutely accurately, which took three attempts. The designs and then the stone carving for the dialstone and the placement of the gnomons (which cast the sun's shadow on each dial face) had to exactly reflect the astronomer's calculations. Once this was done, the dialstone had to be placed atop the column with precise accuracy - this took three days, with the astronomer and the architect present on the scaffolding. It is an extraordinary tribute to all those involved in this complex project that all six faces tell the time accurately to within ten seconds.

Sundials tell apparent solar time. Sundials at either end of a football pitch would not tell exactly the same time. This geographical variation in measured time did not matter until the advent of the railways which required uniform timetables. Greenwich Mean Time was adopted across Great Britain by the Railway Clearing House in 1847. Our sponsored Time Plaques on The Dials show how apparent solar time is converted into Greenwich Mean Time at different times of the year.

The reconstruction of the Sundial Pillar was a complex project involving architecture, horology, gnomics, structural engineering, history, street works and much else. The Sundial Pillar brought back to life a lost neighbourhood whose name had disappeared from the memories of Londoners and was largely unknown to visitors. It has acted as an economic regenerator over time and become a new London landmark. As London's only pillar sundial it is a reminder of time-keeping as it was many years ago. 

Maps of Seven Dials over the last 300+ years show how the basic street layout has remained little changed. The slum clearance and road widening to make present-day Shaftesbury Avenue reduced the size of the area but the characteristic layout has been retained and an old route, Cucumber Alley, has been restored. This is the only quarter of London remaining almost intact from late Stuart England.

1658 (Faithorne and Newcourt): Shows the site of the Seven Dials development as fields. (Courtesy of Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre).

1723 (John Strype): St Giles' Parish map, shows the orientation of the base of the Sundial Pillar and illustrates the unique layout of Seven Dials compared to its surrounds.

1723 (John Strype): Zoomed into Seven Dials in St Giles' Parish.

1745 (James Rocque Map): showing some early street names and confirmation of the orientation of the Sundial Pillar. (Courtesy of Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre Library)

Seven Dials 1776 by William Hodges. Just after the removal of the Sundial Pillar.

Paul Draper, trustee of the Seven Dials Trust, created this theoretical drawing of how the original Sundial Pillar may have appeared in c.1750, based on William Hodge's (1773) painting produced three years after the column had been removed.

1799 (Richard Horwood): the Sundial Pillar has gone. Lombard Court has become Lomber Court and Coucumber Alley has become Neale's Passage. The map has a greater degree of accuracy and detail (including street numbering), particularly useful in showing the original form and how much of Thomas Neale's 1690s layout remains.

1874 (OS): Former Monmouth Street has become Dudley Street and Lomber Court has become Lumber Court. Neal's Yard and Neal's Passage have now dropped the "e" of Thomas Neale. A public street urinal has appeared at Seven Dials and there are now about fourteen public houses within the area. The Brewery buildings around Castle Street (today's Shelton Street) have been expanded and, in the 1880s, will come to dominate Great Earl Street.

[Line drawing of Seven Dials]

Seven Dials 1888.

1889 Charles Booth's poverty map: note the stark variation between the black designation of Nottingham Court (thought to be a base of prostitution) and the well-to-do fringes of Upper St Martin's Lane and Shaftesbury Avenue.

1894 (OS): Shaftesbury Avenue has been created, clearing Seven Dials slums (compare with 1874 plan of former Dudley Street).

1910 (OS): showing more street name changes (Tower Court and Mercer Street) and the disappearance of the Seven Dials urinal.

Cambridge Theatre, Seven Dials 1930.

2000: Seven Dials, showing much of the original street plan, the restoration of the 1690s Sundial Pillar and traffic management features.

1910 view of Mercer Street (north) showing a range of the small local businesses typical of the area, including a bicycle repair shop, hairdresser and wardrobe dealer.

c1895 The Crown public house looking north. The form of Monmouth Street and Short's Gardens is retained today although many Victorian features have been lost.

The Dials circa 1890.

Illustration from Knight's London, 1842. Charles Knight published a variety of illustrated works such as Old England and the Land we Live in and the Pictorial Gallery of Arts, based on the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Knight's London, 1842

"It is time to come to the modern St. Giles's. This interesting district is bounded to the north by the great brewhouse in Bainbridge Street, and on the south by the great brewhouse in Castle (now Shelton) Street; and extends from Hog Lane on the west, to Drury Lane on the east.... the Parish of St. Giles may be considered one of the most thoroughly uniform and consistent in point of character of any in London...

The Seven Dials...are evidence of an attempt to civilise the neighbourhood by introducing respectable houses into it. The attempt was not altogether vain: this part of the parish has ever since 'worn its dirt with a difference.'...

In Monmouth Street we find one of the great ateliers from which the milk-shops, ginger-beer stalls, green-groceries and pot-houses of the suburbs are supplied with sign-boards. Theatrical amateurs appear to abound... in no part of town do we find singing-birds in greater number and variety; and as most of the houses being of an old fashion, have broad ledges of lead over the shop windows, these are frequently converted into hanging gardens....

The bulk of the permanent population seems composed of Hebrews and natives of the Emerald Isle. The former preponderate in Monmouth Street (and this being the case it is a favourable account of their practical tolerance that there is a flourishing pork and sausage shop near one end of the street, and an equally flourishing Roman Catholic booksellers at the other); the Irish abound most in the lanes and courts...

Illustration from Knight's London, 1842.

The classical reader may possibly retain from his schoolboy days a recollection of a race of people called Troglodytes -  dwellers in caves, an intermediate species between man and the rabbit. Their descendants still flourish in great force in Monmouth Street. Cellars serving whole families for kitchen, parlour bed-room and all are to be found in other streets of London, but not so numerous and near to each other. Here they cluster like cells in the Order of La Trappe.... it is curious and interesting to watch the habits of these human moles when they emerge or half-emerge from their cavities...."

  The full text from Knight's London, 1842 (PDF)

John Gay in Trivia, 1716

"Thames Street gives cheeses, Covent Garden fruits, / Moorfields old books, and Monmouth Street old suits."

John Gay

John Gay in Trivia, 1716

"Where famed St. Giles' ancient limits spread / An inrailed column rears its lofty head; / Here to seven streets, seven dials count the day / And from each other catch the circling ray; / Here oft the peasant with enquiring face / Bewildered trudges on from place to place; / He dwells on every sign with stupid gaze, / Enters the narrow alley's doubtful maze, / Tries every winding court and street in vain, / And doubles o'er his weary steps again."

M. Grossley - French visitor, 1765

"Happening to go one evening from the part of Town where I lived, to the Museum, I passed by Seven Dials. The place was crowded with people waiting to see a poor wretch stand in the pillory, whose punishment was deferred to another day. The mob, provoked at this disappointment, vented their rage upon all that passed their way, whether afoot or in coaches and threw at them dirt, rotten eggs, dead dogs, ordure, which they had provided to pelt the unhappy wretch according to custom."

Charles Dickens at his desk in 1858, by Watkins. Many writers refer to Seven Dials, particularly in Victorian times, when St Giles to the north and Seven Dials were infamous as the two most notorious 'rookeries' in London. Charles Dickens was one of the area's most prominent chroniclers.

Charles Dickens Sketches by "Boz," (1868 edition), Seven Dials

"Seven Dials! The region of song and poetry - first effusions and last dying speeches: hallowed by the names of Catnac and of Pitts - names that will entwine themselves with costermongers and barrel-organs, when penny magazines shall have superseded penny yards of songs, and capital punishment be unknown!

But what involutions can compare with those of Seven Dials? Where is there such another maze of streets, courts, lanes and alleys? Where such a pure mixture of Englishmen and Irishmen, as in this complicated part of London?...

The stranger who finds himself in 'the Dials' for the first time and stands Belzoni-like, at the entrance of seven obscure passages, uncertain which to take, will see enough around him to keep his curiosity and attention awake for no considerable time. From the irregular square into which he was plunged, the streets and courts dart in all directions, until they are lost in the unwholesome vapour which hangs over the house-tops, and renders the dirty perspective uncertain and confined; and lounging in every corner, as if they came there to take a few gasps of such fresh air as has found its way so far, but is too much exhausted already to be enabled to force its way into the narrow alleys around, are groups of people, whose appearance and dwellings would fill any mind but a regular Londoner's with astonishment....

If the external appearance of the houses, or a glance at their inhabitants, present but few attractions, a closer acquaintance with either is little calculated to alter ones first impression. Every room has either its separate tenant and every tenant is, by the same mysterious dispensation which causes a country curate to 'increase and multiply' most marvellously, generally the head of a numerous family....

....shops for the purchase of rags, bones, old iron and kitchen stuff, vie in cleanliness with the bird fanciers and rabbit dealers.... Brokers' shops which would seem to have established by humane individuals, as refuges for destitute bugs, interspersed with announcements for day-schools, penny theatres, petition writers, and music for balls or routs, complete the 'still life' of the subject; and dirty men and filthy women, squalid children, fluttering shuttlecocks, noisy battledores, reeking pipes, bad fruit, more doubtful oysters, attenuated cats, depressed dogs, and anatomical fowls, are its cheerful accompaniments."

'Seven Dials' Sketches by Boz, by Charles Dickens.

Frontispiece of Sketches by "Boz," first edition, Feb, 1836. Illustration by George Cruikshank.

  The full text from Sketches by "Boz," on Seven Dials by Charles Dickens, 1836 (PDF)

Charles Dickens Sketches by "Boz"(1868 edition), Monmouth Street

"We have always entertained a particular attachment towards Monmouth Street as the only true and real emporium for second-hand wearing apparel. Monmouth-street is venerable from its antiquity, and respectable from its usefulness...

We have hinted at the antiquity of our favourite spot. A 'Monmouth-street laced coat' was a by-word a century ago; and still we find Monmouth-street the same.... Through every alteration and every change, Monmouth-street has still remained the burial place of the fashions; and such, to judge from all present appearances, it will remain until there are no more fashions to bury...."