Leicester Square's garden exists because 17th-century parishioners complained to the king
When the Earl of Leicester fenced off common land in front of his new London mansion in the 1630s, local parishioners protested to Charles I. Royal arbitrators ordered part of the ground kept open for them. That leftover patch became Leicester Square, now the glittering heart of London's film premieres.
Robert Sidney, 2nd Earl of Leicester, bought the land in 1630 and had Leicester House standing by 1635. The square to its south was laid out in the 1670s as a smart residential address, and it drew remarkable neighbours. Frederick, Prince of Wales, lived in Leicester House from 1742 until his death in 1751. William Hogarth worked at No 30 from 1733 to 1764, producing Gin Lane there, and Joshua Reynolds lived at No 47 until 1792.
The tone slipped in the late 18th century. Shops crept in, naturalist Ashton Lever turned Leicester House into a museum of curiosities, and the mansion was pulled down after the Leicester peerage died out. A grand royal opera house planned for the square in 1790 never went ahead because it could not obtain the licence then required for a theatre. Instead the 19th century brought popular spectacles, such as Wyld's Great Globe, a giant map of the Earth built for the 1851 Great Exhibition.
Theatres came next. The Alhambra, opened in 1854, got a boost when Queen Victoria and her family came to see a horse show, and became a ballet venue before making way for the Odeon cinema in 1936. The Empire Theatre drew scandal over its upper promenade; when screens went up to block it in 1894, a young Winston Churchill, then a Sandhurst cadet, helped tear them down. It became the Empire Cinema in the late 1920s.
During the 1979 bin strike, rubbish piled so high that locals called it Fester Square. The square was closed to traffic in the 1980s and refurbished for more than 15 million pounds before the 2012 Olympics.
Source: Leicester Square
