Why Great Windmill Street matters.
Great Windmill Street is a theatrical corridor where Soho's creative character meets seventeenth-century origins, Georgian fabric and an entertainment history extending from anatomy lectures to music hall and revue.
Running through Soho between Mayfair, and Covent Garden, the compact north-south corridor occupies the western half of the neighborhood, curving gently between Brewer Street and Coventry Street as Shaftesbury Avenue cuts across its southern section. Westminster characterizes its three to five-storey pavement-edge buildings and curving alignment as producing an unusually intimate enclosure within Soho's otherwise straighter street grid. No. 29 preserves the smaller scale through a mid-eighteenth-century brick house with a stuccoed ground floor, later shopfront and original staircase behind its narrow façade. The southern end expands dramatically beside the London Pavilion, whose Great Windmill Street elevation forms part of the large late Victorian composition confronting Piccadilly Circus. The result is a corridor where Soho's architectural compression heightens each transition, moving within a few minutes from surviving Georgian proportions through narrow entertainment frontages into the grander theater architecture surrounding Shaftesbury Avenue.
What defines Great Windmill Street.
Great Windmill Street is best known for converting a name inherited from Soho's pre-urban landscape into an address associated with scientific teaching, popular entertainment and theatrical experimentation. A windmill stood in Windmill Field from 1560, and its demolition during the 1690s left the street with a name preserving the rural ground from which western Soho emerged. William Hunter gave the address a radically different significance in 1768 when he opened an anatomy school, theater and museum in a Great Windmill Street house whose surviving façade was designed by Robert Mylne 1767. Hunter had already established himself as a leading anatomy teacher and physician to Queen Charlotte, and the new complex joined medical instruction with the collections of anatomical specimens, books, manuscripts, coins and works of art that accompanied his teaching. Matthew Baillie entered Hunter's school in 1779 and subsequently inherited responsibility for part of his uncle's medical legacy after Hunter died in 1783, when the principal collections were left to the University of Glasgow. Entertainment acquired comparable weight during the nineteenth century: Loibl and Sonnhammer roofed the yard of the Black Horse Inn in 1859 to create the first London Pavilion Music Hall, embedding organized popular performance into the southern end of the street. Construction of Shaftesbury Avenue displaced that first hall, and the new London Pavilion opened beside Piccadilly Circus in 1885 as one of the earliest major buildings on the newly created avenue. Great Windmill Street consequently moved through several forms of public instruction and performance, with Hunter's anatomical demonstrations preceding the music-hall culture that helped make the surrounding West End an international entertainment district.
The Windmill Theatre concentrated that entertainment history inside one Great Windmill Street address after Laura Henderson acquired the former Palais de Luxe and converted it into a small theater in 1931. Early plays and films failed to establish a profitable formula, prompting manager Vivian Van Damm to introduce Revudeville, a continuous program of singers, dancers, comedians and specialty acts in 1932. Nude tableaux vivants became its most distinctive innovation, with performers maintaining motionless poses that allowed Van Damm to work within the censorship restrictions governing the London stage. Continuous variety subsequently became central to the Windmill's reputation, and the theater promoted the wartime slogan “We Never Closed,” although compulsory restrictions closed entertainment venues briefly in September 1939. The London Archives preserves a 1960 image advertising the Windmill's twenty-ninth year, continuous Revudeville schedule and performers whose careers began there, capturing the institution near the end of its original theatrical period. Revudeville ended in 1964 when the building became a cinema, closing a run that had made the Windmill one of the street's most recognizable cultural institutions. Henderson and Van Damm transformed a modest former cinema into a laboratory for continuous variety, stage censorship and emerging comic talent, giving Great Windmill Street a twentieth-century theatrical chapter as distinctive as Hunter's eighteenth-century medical school.
How Great Windmill Street fits.
Great Windmill Street works as the anchor for a daytime exploration of Soho through ecclesiastical reconstruction, eighteenth-century domestic craftsmanship and the urban geometry of a surviving seventeenth-century square.
Begin at St. Anne's Church Soho, where the original parish church rose during the seventeenth-century development of Soho before wartime destruction left S. P. Cockerell's 1801 to 1803 tower as its principal historic survivor. Cockerell built the tower in stock brick and Portland stone, developing its upper stage through Doric columns, a tapered belfry and an unusual clock structure that shifts from stone cone to lead drum before reaching its weathervane. Continue to House of St. Barnabas, where Joseph Pearce created a substantial corner house in 1744 to 1746 and the interior was subsequently fitted for Richard Beckford with carved wood, ornamental chimneypieces, plasterwork and an elaborate stone staircase. The House of Charity later occupied the building, adding Joseph Clarke's Gothic chapel in 1862 with marble facing, mosaic work, apsed chapels and a large western rose window. Conclude at Golden Square, whose surviving eighteenth-century buildings and central statue preserve another stage in Soho's transformation from peripheral development into a fashionable urban quarter. The garden's Grade II statue by John Van Nost represents George II, creating a royal centerpiece within a square whose smaller scale remains distinct from the grand West End spaces farther south. The progression moves from Cockerell's reconstruction of Soho's parish presence through Pearce and Clarke's successive domestic and charitable architecture into Van Nost's royal sculpture at Golden Square, revealing how worship, private wealth and public urban form shaped the neighborhood surrounding Great Windmill Street.
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