Fitzrovia

The bohemian half of the West End: Charlotte Street restaurants, the BT Tower overhead, and pubs full of dead writers.

A district that had to be given a name. The streets between Oxford Street and Euston Road belonged to the Fitzroy family, and in the late 1930s the drinkers of the Fitzroy Tavern started calling the area Fitzrovia after their pub; a gossip column printed it in 1940 and it stuck. It was where people came who wanted London without paying Mayfair prices for it. Painters worked in the studios round Fitzroy Square, which Robert Adam had a hand in designing; Virginia Woolf lived on it, and George Bernard Shaw before her. Dylan Thomas, George Orwell and half of literary London drank in the Fitzroy and the Wheatsheaf, and Rimbaud and Verlaine lodged nearby. The trades were the rag trade and furniture making, and the advertising business grew up on Charlotte Street among them. Overhead is the BT Tower, finished in 1964 and for a while the tallest building in the country, with a revolving restaurant at the top that closed after a bomb went off in it in 1971 and never reopened. It is the thing you navigate by from every street corner. What the area is now is somewhere to eat. Charlotte Street and the lanes off it hold more restaurants per yard than anywhere else in the West End, and Fitzroy Square, cobbled and closed to traffic, is one of the few places in central London where you can hear birds.