Piccadilly Circus

Piccadilly Circus and "Eros"

Piccadilly Circus is a road junction in London's West End, where Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, and Piccadilly converge. At its centre stands the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, topped by Alfred Gilbert's aluminium figure popularly – if incorrectly – known as Eros. The statue is actually the Angel of Christian Charity, erected in 1893 to honour the Victorian philanthropist the Earl of Shaftesbury. The confusion is understandable: a winged, near-naked youth with a bow is irresistible to mythology. It also turns out to be rather fitting.

Beneath the circus runs one of the oldest deep-level tube stations on the network. The Piccadilly line was financed by the American entrepreneur Charles Tyson Yerkes, a Chicago transit magnate who arrived in London in 1900 and funded the construction of much of the modern Underground before his death in 1905 – never quite living to see it open.

For well over a century, Piccadilly Circus has been one of the defining meeting places of queer London – by day and by night, in plain sight and in shadow. The steps and railings around the fountain's base became so associated with gay men and male sex workers that they acquired their own name: the Dilly.

Early twentieth century

By the Edwardian era, Piccadilly Circus and its immediate surroundings had become well established as a centre of queer sociability. The area offered what most of London denied: anonymity, crowds, and proximity to several venues where different rules quietly applied. The Criterion Restaurant on the south side of the circus – nicknamed the Witches' Cauldron and, later, the Bargain Basement – was known from at least the 1900s as a place where gay men and gender-nonconforming Londoners could socialise with a degree of safety. The basement bar attracted a bohemian clientele that blurred the lines between theatrical camp, criminal underworld, and genuine working-class queer culture.

The London Pavilion, on the northeastern corner of the circus, was another focal point. Its promenade – the covered walkway around the music hall's upper tier – had been used for decades by sex workers of all kinds, and gay men found it a relatively tolerant space in which to make contact. The management was pragmatic; the trade was profitable.

The Dilly boys

The young men known as Dilly boys – male sex workers who congregated around the railings of the Shaftesbury Memorial – are documented from at least the 1930s, and almost certainly earlier. The iron railings at the base of the fountain became known as the meat rack: a term used without irony in the argot of queer London. The boys who worked the Dilly ranged from teenagers surviving on the street to older men who had carved out a precarious living in the area for years. Many were not exclusively or even primarily gay; money, not desire, brought most of them to the circus at night.

The Metropolitan Police tolerated rather than suppressed the trade for much of the mid-twentieth century, partly because the area's visibility made surveillance easier and partly because periodic crackdowns tended simply to scatter the trade to less manageable locations. The railings were a known quantity. Their presence in the landscape of queer London is recorded in journalism, court records, memoirs, and novels – most famously in Colin MacInnes's Absolute Beginners (1959) and in J.R. Ackerley's posthumously published memoir My Father and Myself (1968).

1950s

After the Second World War, Piccadilly Circus became increasingly central to queer commercial life as neighbouring Leicester Square was subjected to sustained police and LCC pressure on heterosexual vice – pressure that paradoxically made gay men's presence there less, not more, welcome. The circus itself offered several complementary attractions. On the southeast was the Lilypond; on the south, the Criterion; to the north on Glasshouse Street, the Regent's Palace Hotel, whose bar was popular with gay men for some four decades. The Trocadero to the northeast completed a rough circuit that a queer Londoner could work on a single evening. Bars including the White Bear and Ward's Irish House drew a regular crowd. Beneath it all – in the underground station that Charles Tyson Yerkes built – the toilets were in heavy use for cottaging, a risk that many men evidently judged worth taking.

1970s

On 1 July 1972, several hundred people gathered at Trafalgar Square and marched to Hyde Park, passing through Piccadilly Circus en route. It was the first Gay Pride march in the United Kingdom, organised by the Gay Liberation Front. The sight of an openly gay crowd marching through the heart of the West End, past the Dilly and around the circus, was something that even most participants had barely allowed themselves to imagine. Peter Tatchell, who took part, later described it as transformative. The tradition has continued ever since: London Pride still marches past Piccadilly Circus each summer, and the fountain remains one of the most photographed moments on the route.

1990s

On 5 September 1990, OutRage! – the direct action group co-founded by Peter Tatchell – organised a mass kiss-in at Piccadilly Circus to protest against the Metropolitan Police's practice of arresting gay men for kissing in public. Around 400 people gathered at the fountain and kissed, loudly and publicly, while a troop of cheerleaders from London's newly formed chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence urged them on – the Sisters' first public appearance in Britain. There were no arrests. The national press covered the action: the Guardian ran a photograph with the caption "kiss of death"; the Independent reported, primly, that "unless homosexuals wish to alienate the public they should conduct themselves with restraint." The action is widely regarded as a turning point in how the Metropolitan Police began to treat public displays of gay affection.

2000s

DTPM ran for several years at the Trocadero, drawing large crowds and earning a reputation as one of London's most musically adventurous club nights.

See also: Timeline of West End Bars and Clubs