ory to the building
of Seven Dials. The name of this notorious place has been connected with
degradation and misery, but at first it was considered rather an
architectural wonder. Evelyn, in his diary, October 5, 1694, says: "I
went to see the building beginning near St. Giles, where seven streets
make a star from a Doric pillar placed in the middle of a circular area,
said to be built by Mr. Neale." Gay also refers to the central column in
his "Trivia." The column had really only six dial faces, two streets
converging toward one. In the open space on which it stood was a
pillory, and the culprits who stood here were often most brutally
stoned. One John Waller, charged with perjury, was killed in this manner
in 1732.

In 1773 the column was taken down in a search for imaginary treasure. It
was set up again in 1822 on Weybridge Green as a memorial to the Duchess
of York, who died 1820. The dial was not replaced, and was used as a
stepping-stone at the Ship Inn at Weybridge; it still lies on one side
of the Green. The streets of Seven Dials attained a very unenviable
reputation, and were the haunt of all that was vicious and bad. Terrible
accounts of the overcrowding and consequent immorality come down to us
from the newspaper echoes of the earlier part of the nineteenth
century. The opening up of the new thoroughfares of New Oxford Street,
Shaftesbury Avenue, and Charing Cross Road, have done much, but the
neighbourhood is still a slum. The seven streets remain in their
starlike shape, by name Great and Little White Lion Street, Great and
Little St. Andrew Street, Great and Little Earl Street, and Queen
Street.

Short's Gardens was in 1623 really a garden, and a little later than
that date was acquired by a man named Dudley Short.

Betterton Street was until comparatively recently called Brownlow, from
Sir John Brownlow of Belton, who had a house here in Charles II.'s time.
The street is now, to use a favourite expression of Stow's, "better
built than inhabited," for the row of brick houses of no very squalid
type are inhabited by the very poor.

Endell Street was built in 1844, at the time of the erection of the
workhouse. In it are the National Schools, a Protestant Swiss chapel,
and an entrance to the public baths and wash-houses, to the south of
which rise the towers of the workhouse. Christ Church is hemmed in by
the workhouse, having an outlet only on the street. The church was
consecrated in 1845. In Short's