London's Piccadilly is named after a tailor's frilly collars
Around 1611 a tailor named Robert Baker bought land west of London and grew rich selling piccadills, the fashionable stiff collars of the day. Within two years locals were calling his new house Pickadilly Hall, and the name eventually spread to one of the widest, straightest streets in central London.
The road itself is far older. In the Middle Ages it was simply the road to Reading, though unlike Oxford Street there is no sign it followed a Roman route. Baker fenced off his land despite local grazing rights and built homes and a shop. After his death in 1623 his heirs squabbled, and the estate slid to the Crown and then to a speculator, Colonel Thomas Panton, who was developing it by the 1670s. A nearby gaming house became popular with the gentry; one lord lost 3,000 pounds at cards there in 1641.
The street briefly had a royal name. In 1663 it became Portugal Street after Catherine of Braganza, queen of Charles II, and its traffic grew once an older route was closed in 1668 to create Green Park. Grand mansions such as Clarendon House and Burlington House rose on the northern side. Yet people kept using the old name, and a map in 1746 labelled the whole road Piccadilly.
Shops and inns followed. In 1705 Hugh Mason and William Fortnum went into business selling candles recycled from the royal household, the start of Fortnum and Mason. The Old White Horse Cellar at No. 155 became one of England's best known coaching inns. The Ritz opened in 1906 on the site of two demolished buildings, and Christopher Wren designed St James's Church, consecrated in 1684.
Money settled at the western end. Nathan Mayer Rothschild moved his bank to No. 107 in 1825, and so many family mansions with ballrooms and marble staircases followed that it was nicknamed Rothschild Row. Melbourne House, later converted into the Albany apartments, housed two prime ministers, Gladstone and Edward Heath. Today the road runs just under a mile, from Hyde Park Corner to Piccadilly Circus.
Source: Piccadilly
