The San Francisco call., 1895-05-19
LONDON'S SEVEN DIALs.
Name Identified With Crime and Ma
BE Changed.

Name Identified With Crime and May
Be Changed.
The Seven Dials were never notable for
anything worse than thieves, dealers in
live animals, old clothes and theatrical
properties" and publishers of the Cat
match literature, for specimens of which
collectors are now willing to pay such high
prices. The opening up of the radiating
streets has long rendered the neighbor-
hood as harmless to the pedestrian as the
once equally notorious Gray's Inn road.
Yet middle-aged Londoners have no diff
Guilty in recalling when they had to keep a
sharp lookout in running the gauntlet of
Little st. Andrews street and its sisters
after nightfall, says the London Standard.
How it drifted into being the dens of the
criminal classes it is hard to say; for
originally-so Evelyn tells us-the Seven
Dials, thus named from the clock-faces on
doric pillar at the point where seven
streets met, was intended as the residence
of highly respectable people who liked to
be near the fashionable coffee houses in
Covent Garden, the court in Whitehall and
the gay world which then centered in Bow
street and Drury lane. At first, indeed,
the locality was called the Seven Streets,
though in 170S only four of them had been
actually built on the ground known as the
Cock and Pie Fields, surrounded by fetid
ditch, which emptied into the Thames.
The houses were latter the Venetian
style," just then introduced by Mr.
Neale, who made fortune in lottery spec
ulation. For many years the neighbor-
hood maintained its gentility and was,
indeed, regarded as quite a triumph in
architecture. In Gays Trivia it is re-
ferred to as "Seven streets Seven Dials
count their day, and from each other catch
the circIing ray" though, as matter of
fact, the dial pillar had but six faces, two
of the seven streets opening into one angle.
A curious legend getting into vogue to
the effect that great treasure was buried
under the column, 1t was removed in June,
Iva, and never replaced. Some fifty years
afterward it and the dials were bought of a
stone-mason, who had in some way be-
come possessed of them, and, with the ad-
dition of a ducal coronet, were set up on
Weybridge green as memorial to the
Duchess of York. Until very recently-f
it does not do so still-the dial stone
formed stepping stone at an adjoining
inn. But before the beginning of the CEN
tury the Seven Dials had begun to share in
the general squalor of ST. Giles, and less
than fifty years ago it was collection of
rOokeries at which modern sanitarians
would stand aghast. Whole families have
lived in cellars, as an eyewitness described
them, slike cells in convent of the order
of La Trappe, or like onions on rope.''
The inmates descended into these under
ground warrens by means of trap-ladders,
and at intervals came up to breathe, dis
appearing with amazing alacrity when
constable or a Bow-street runner happened
to come within their limited purview.
Beggars' lodging houses and ''thieves'
kitchen" were frequent, and were rather
encouraged by the police, for the con-
venience they afforded the latter of being
able to lay hands upon any particular indi-
vidual when wanted. Men about town
used to form parties to visit these haunts.
The Regent and Major Hanger are said to
have attended carnival in the Seven
Dials, but wished they had abandoned
their adventure when 'that ere gemman