Piccadilly Circus
At the junction of Regent Street and Shaftesbury Avenue
At the junction of Regent Street and Shaftesbury Avenue lies a trapezoidal area near London's West End known to the world as Piccadilly Circus. It's an odd name since there's no circus there, but even odder is that 'circus' usually denotes around city area where several streets meet in a circle, after the Roman plan. But that eccentricity fits Piccadilly Circus since this area of the great British capital attracts the most diverse set of people in an already diverse town. The first half of the Piccadilly Circus name comes from a 17th-century frilly collar called a "picadil". The name is a perfect description, for here are the frills of London. Here are pubs, monuments, shops and nearby theatre in the West End. Yes, Piccadilly Circus, akin to New York's Times Square, it's filled with traffic, crowds and (mainly at night) neon lights befitting its role as a major tourist attraction. Known already by 1743 by its current name, the junction was created in 1819 and its history shows. There's the bronze Shaftesbury memorial fountain, erected in 1893, topped by a statue of Anteros, the Angel of Christian Charity. (The Evening Standard uses a graphic of the nude statue on its masthead.) Technologically innovative at the time, it was the first sculpture to be cast in aluminium. In the late 1980s, the fountain was moved from the centre to its present Piccadilly Circus location at the south-west corner of the intersection. Let me introduce you to the Times Square of our city.
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