Stand on the steps of the sundial pedestal that marks the centre of Seven Dials and take your pick. London’s vibrant retail and entertainment offer is laid out before you. Cocktail bars, theatres, cafes, restaurants, boutiques, independents and big names. Once synonymous with thieving, poverty and slum housing the place is now, according to high-end promotional blurb, “full of surprises and hidden gems waiting to be discovered”.
Small and compact, found to the north-west of Covent Garden, Seven Dials’ distinctive star-shaped layout was designed in the 1690s by MP and speculator Thomas Neale. He hoped that the properties built along the seven streets that radiate out from the sundial would be attractive to wealthy residents, but this proved not to be the case. By the middle of the nineteenth century densely packed with warehouses and factories, dilapidated and over-crowded tenements, mean courtyards and shabby shops occasioned Dickens to write of the area’s unwholesome vapours, dirty perspectives and drunken women quarrelling in the street.
Such is the backdrop to Matt Houlbrook’s brilliantly realised telling of the start of the area’s transformation as the ‘monstrous machine of capital’ sought to redevelop London in the period after the First World War. Each of the seven chapters details the changes wrought on each of the streets. Planners, architects, local authorities and property speculators saw Seven Dials as a problem to be solved, but visions differed as to what the new London should look like and how it should be achieved. Houlbrook deftly and entertainingly picks his way through the many and varied conflicts between competing parties as pressure builds to abolish the slum of Seven Dials.
While grand improvement schemes fizzle out, there are some positive local initiatives that he details, such as the opening of St Giles Buildings in 1925 which creates decent, affordable homes for 140 working-class people. Other developments, such as the building of the Cambridge theatre between 1928-30-Amasterpiece of theatre design reflecting Art Deco and expressionist influences-are seen as part of an ambition to integrate the Dials into the West End. But they too falter, the area becoming a place of failed visions, shabby compromises, mismanaged decline.
As much as it is a book about the politics of urban life, it is also a recreation of a lost London. Richly populated we meet ordinary people who led extraordinary lives. We get to know long term residents, local traders, costermongers, flower girls and business owners and the more cosmopolitan and transient Italian, Belgian, French and Jewish populations looking to make a living on the margins of modern London.
The central story however, and the one that first inspired Houlbrook to tell the story of Seven Dials, is both a human drama played out in the High Court and a vivid description of how commercial pressures spread into unfashionable districts squeezing out ordinary residents and small businesses in the pursuit of suppressed property values.
Jim Kitten, a Sierra Leonean man, and his London-born wife Emily move to Great White Lion street in 1921. Working in the kitchens of upmarket restaurants they save hard to open their own café. Kitten’s café becomes part of a community of restaurants and lodging houses run by and for Black and Asian people and earns the Seven Dials area the nickname the “Black colony”. Bracewell Smith, a property developer and owner of the Shaftesbury hotel opposite, orchestrates a campaign of intimidation against the café, its clientele and the owners. Smith organises petitions, lobbies local politicians, encourages police intimidation and derogatory newspaper reporting to tackle what he claims is “Arendezvous for coloured criminals of all descriptions” and in favour of his wider ambitions to “abolish the slums”. In a desperate attempt to clear their names and to rescue their business the Kittens, showing a touching faith in British justice, sue the John Bull newspaper, which for weeks carried the slurs, for libel. Suffice to say, while Bracewell Smith will go on to make his fortune and rise up through municipal and national Conservative politics, the Kittens fare less well.
Houlbrook has dedicated twenty years to work through archival material in censuses, genealogical and newspaper databases, the committee reports of Holborn Borough Council and the London County Council. His achievement is to create this loving and vivid portrayal of one small corner of London, its making and remaking after The Great War and to unpack the power of a still mysterious name to carry stories about a neighbourhood’s past.
Publisher: Manchester University Press, 302 pp, £20, 2025.
