Piccadilly Circus's famous lights began with a Perrier sign in 1908
The glowing adverts at Piccadilly Circus started modestly in 1908 with a sign for Perrier. Neon arrived with Bovril, Coca-Cola has held a spot since 1954, and in January 2017 the screens went dark for their longest stretch since the 1940s while six displays were merged into one giant curved screen.
The junction was laid out in 1819 to join John Nash's new Regent Street to Piccadilly and was first called Regent Circus South. Circus here simply means a round open space, from the Latin for circle. It became a one-way roundabout in July 1926, got traffic lights a few weeks later, and kept gas street lamps until 1932, long after electric adverts had appeared on its buildings.
Signs once wrapped around the whole space, but today only one building carries them, an unnamed block on the northwestern corner still nicknamed Monico after a cafe that stood there. Rising rents have cut the number of advertisers over the years. Neon gave way to digital projectors and then LED screens, which had fully replaced neon by 2011. For several months in 2002 Yoko Ono paid an estimated 150,000 pounds to display a line from John Lennon's song Imagine. The lights are switched off on rare occasions, for instance when Winston Churchill died in 1965 and when Princess Diana died in 1997.
The winged statue on the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain is usually called Eros, but it actually depicts his brother Anteros. The fountain, put up in 1893 to honour the philanthropist the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, has been removed twice, once so a new Tube station could be dug beneath it and again during the Second World War, and was shifted to the southwestern corner in the late 1980s.
The Circus nearly vanished under concrete. A 1962 plan by Lord Holford proposed a double-decker junction, with pedestrians on an elevated deck and cars below, and a 1972 scheme added towers up to 73 metres tall. Both were rejected, and apart from pedestrianising its south side in the 1980s, the Circus has escaped major redevelopment.
Source: Piccadilly Circus
