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.

Prominent Modernist architect, Henry Thomas 'Jim' Cadbury-Brown, made his home at 32 Neal Street between 1964–1982. One of the designers of the Festival of Britain, he is perhaps best known for his work on the Royal College of Art.

The Cave of Harmony was a popular meeting place for London intellectuals, including H G Wells, Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. It was founded by the young Elsa Lanchester (later famous in films as The Bride of Frankenstein) and her then partner, Harold Scott. 

A masterly translator of Virgil, John Dryden was also a brilliant versifier, a discerning critic and a savage satirist. He has been called 'the literary dictator of his age' and the first master of modern English prose. 

Knight of the stage and Hollywood star, Sir John Gielgud lived in a flat on this site from where he could see one of the theatres in which he directed and acted to great acclaim, now The Noel Coward Theatre.

John Jacob Holtzapffel was the most famous producer and seller of luxury ornamental turning lathes. Priced at many times the annual wage of an ordinary worker, they were much sought after by wealthy amateurs: clergy, aristocrats and heads of state.  

An iconic Covent Garden name, the barrow-making firm Ellen Keeley, named for the costermonger matriarch, had premises on Neal Street and in nearby Nottingham Court. They invented and manufactured several barrows, much used in London's wholesale markets.

Architectural draughtsman Thomas Malton the Younger was hailed by J.M.W. Turner, who studied drawing under him, as 'my real master'. 

Max Reinhardt's successful fifty-year career in British book publishing culminated in The Bodley Head Press which he bought with a loan from the actor Ralph Richardson and  persuaded J. B. Priestley and Graham Greene to join his board of directors. 

The English water-colourist William Henry Hunt specialised in still life and also exhibited scenes from rustic life, but it was for his studies of birds' nests in hedgerows that he was most well known. 

Portrait photographer Angus McBean is known for his radical experiments, using the devices of surrealism to create fantastical images of theatrical stars and society figures. In the early 1960s he photographed the Beatles for the cover of their first album.

William Hazlitt was probably the first Englishman to make a living as a professional critic. A parliamentary reporter and a freelance lecturer, he is best remembered as an essayist.

Lionel Lukin, a fashionable London coach builder had a taste for science and a fertile mechanical mind. Among his many inventions was an 'unsubmergible' boat, the first lifeboat.