The pillar in the middle of Seven Dials carries six sundial faces, not seven. That is not a mistake and it is not a later repair: the developer's original plan had six streets, a seventh was squeezed in afterwards, and the Seven Dials Trust is blunt that "a seventh face would have been impossible". The column itself was counted as the missing dial.
Seven Dials is the wedge of streets north-west of Covent Garden where seven roads meet at a small circular junction. What is there now — the shops, the food hall, the painted courtyard of Neal's Yard — is set out on our page about where to shop in Covent Garden, and the wider area on our page about Covent Garden itself.
This page is about the thing everyone photographs and nobody explains: why the junction is shaped like that, where the original column spent two hundred years, and how to read a sundial that disagrees with your phone.
Seven Dials in brief
- Laid out
- From about 1693, by Thomas Neale MP
- The pillar
- Six dial faces; 40 feet high, in streets 40 feet wide
- Original
- Built 1693–94 by Edward Pierce; taken down 1773
- Present column
- A reconstruction, unveiled 29 June 1989
- Cost to see
- Nothing. It is a public street junction, open at all hours
- Nearest stations
- Covent Garden, Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road, all about five minutes away
Why a star, and why six faces
In 1690 William III handed Thomas Neale the freehold of a patch of ground called Cock and Pye Fields, after a public house that stood on it. Neale was Master of the Mint, a member of dozens of parliamentary committees, and according to the Seven Dials Trust the organiser of England's first lottery; he was also short of money, because he had to buy out the remainder of an existing lease and keep paying ground rents.
His problem was arithmetic. Ground rents at the time were charged by the length of a building's frontage, and the fashionable London solution (a square with a garden in the middle) wasted frontage on the garden. A star of narrow streets radiating from a small circle produced far more of it on the same ground. The plan he submitted to Sir Christopher Wren, as Surveyor General, in 1692 showed at least 311 houses and a church for the estate.
Then he cheated. He added a seventh street, which raised the value of the land again, and he never built the church at all. The pillar had already been designed for six streets, so it kept six faces. By the time the diarist John Evelyn came to look at the building work on 5 October 1694 he recorded "seaven streetes made a starr from a Doric Pillar placid in the middle of a Circular area".
The seven streets, and the one that swapped its name
Every street radiating from the Dials has changed name, several of them more than once, and one change causes real confusion for anyone reading an old map or an old novel.
| On the 1691 plan | Later | Today |
|---|---|---|
| Castle Street | Castle Street | Shelton Street |
| Church Street | Queen Street | Short's Gardens |
| Earle Street | Earl Street, Great and Little | Earlham Street |
| King Street | King Street | Neal Street |
| Little Monmouth Street | White Lion Street, Great and Little | Mercer Street |
| Monmouth Street | Dudley Street | Shaftesbury Avenue |
| St Andrew's Street, Great and Little | unchanged | Monmouth Street |
Read the last two rows twice. The Monmouth Street of the original plan is now part of Shaftesbury Avenue, driven through the north-west side of the estate in 1889 as a piece of road improvement and slum clearance. The street signposted Monmouth Street today was St Andrew's Street for two centuries. Nineteenth-century writing about the squalor of "Monmouth Street" is not describing the road with the coffee shop on it.
One further name worth knowing: Neal's Yard appears on the 1691 plan as King's Head Court. It became Neal's Yard, after the developer, later on.
Look down at the bollards, not only up at the dials. The Seven Dials Trust uses a golden hind inside a circle as its motif on the street furniture it has installed around the junction. The deer is the emblem of the ancient parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields, which this ground belonged to before Neale built on it, and the circle stands for the Dials themselves. Once you have seen it you will find it on posts and signs all over the seven streets.
Where the first pillar went, and why
The original column stood for less than eighty years. Every guidebook to London repeats that a mob pulled it down in 1773 hunting for gold buried in the base. Research by the Trust's own chairman found something duller and more plausible in the archives: it was removed by order of the Paving Commissioners, who wanted to stop people congregating around it.
It did not work. A contemporary complaint in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser in the summer of 1773 noted that "the nuisance complained of is not thereby removed", and that the centre where the column had stood was as much of a meeting point as ever, but that "the elegant object, seen from seven different avenues, is and will be no more".
The stones were bought by the architect James Paine and taken to his house at Addlestone in Surrey, where they were never re-erected. In 1820 they were bought again by public subscription and put up on Weybridge Green, topped with a coronet, as a memorial to Frederica, Duchess of York. They are still there. London County Council, the Greater London Council and Camden all asked for the column back at different times, and Weybridge said no each time.
Putting it back: 1984 to 1989
The reconstruction project began in 1984 and took five years, which tells you something about how much is buried under a London street junction. The new pillar does not sit on the ground at all: it stands on a concrete platform carried by three legs sixty feet deep, so that the sewers and services beneath the junction stay reachable.
In 1987 a brass canister was buried under the foundations, made by Comyn Ching, the architectural ironmongers who had traded on these streets since about 1700. Into it went a bottle of penicillin, a set of seventeenth-century medical instruments in a tortoiseshell case, a copy of John Berger's Ways of Seeing, three miniaturised opera scores with a Royal Opera House programme, and a cheque.
The unveiling, on 29 June 1989, was performed by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands with Prince Claus, as the closing event of the tercentenary of William and Mary. Neale had been in the party that met William of Orange when he landed in Devon in 1688. Before the ceremony the finished column was hidden for a fortnight inside two enormous mock lager cans, an advertising stunt that paid for part of the appeal, then under a fifty-foot shroud in Dutch red, white and blue. When the Queen pressed the button, eight thousand balloons went up, each with a return tag. The one that travelled furthest came back from Luxembourg.
Reading a sundial that is not wrong
Visitors glance at the dials, compare them with a phone and conclude the thing is decorative. It is not. Getting it right was a considerable piece of work: the Trust employed an astronomer formerly of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, and because a magnetic compass is useless among steel-framed buildings, true north was derived by timing the shadow of a vertical rod against the sun's calculated position.
The dial tells you apparent solar time at this exact spot, which is not the time on your phone, for two reasons. In summer the United Kingdom runs an hour ahead on British Summer Time, so add an hour between late March and late October. And solar time itself drifts against clock time through the year, by as much as a quarter of an hour in either direction, because the Earth's orbit is not a circle. A plaque at the junction gives the conversion.
The practical upshot: to read it you need direct sun, which at a junction hemmed in by five-storey buildings means the middle of the day. Late morning to mid-afternoon, and preferably between spring and autumn, is when the dials actually do anything.
An hour at the Dials, and when to come
Seven Dials rewards a slow hour rather than a quick photograph, and the difference between a good visit and a bad one is almost entirely the clock.
| When | What it is like |
|---|---|
| Before 10:00 | Deliveries and empty streets. The best light on the painted courtyard and nobody in the way |
| 12:00–15:00 | The only window in which the sundials work, and the busiest hours in Neal's Yard |
| Late afternoon, Saturday | The Piazza to the south is at its worst; the Dials are noticeably calmer, though not quiet |
| Around 19:00, weekdays | Theatre crowds moving through. The shops shut, the restaurants fill |
| Sunday morning | The quietest hours of the week. Several shops open late or not at all |
A route that works: start at the junction, count the dial faces, then walk out along Earlham Street to the Donmar Warehouse and back, turn up Monmouth Street, cut through the passage into Neal's Yard, out into Short's Gardens, and finish on Neal Street. That is about forty minutes with stops and it takes in all seven streets.
For theatre, the Cambridge Theatre sits on the junction itself and the Donmar is a few doors along Earlham Street; booking is explained in our West End theatre guide, and few parts of central London make it easier to eat before a curtain-up.
Neal's Yard, and how to find the way in
The courtyard is genuinely hard to find, which is half its appeal and the reason people walk past it. There are two entrances, both narrow covered passages: one from Short's Gardens and one from Monmouth Street, each barely wider than a doorway and easy to mistake for a service entrance.
The yard is tiny — fifteen paces will cross it — so treat it as a stop rather than a destination. The buildings are painted in flat blocks of colour with planting hung off the walls and brackets, and there are cafés, a bakery and small shops around three sides. Through the middle of the day, and above all at weekends, there will be a queue of people waiting to take the same photograph, and early morning is the only reliable way round that.
Eating and drinking around the seven streets
This is one of the denser eating quarters in central London, and it splits neatly into three kinds of place.
- Seven Dials Market, on Earlham Street, is an indoor food hall run by the street-food organisation Kerb, with twenty-one traders and two bars. It opens Monday and Tuesday from 12:00 to 22:00, Wednesday to Saturday from 11:00 to 23:00, and on Sunday between 11:00 and 21:00, useful hours, because it is open later than most of the area.
- The old specialist shops. Neal's Yard Dairy has sold British farmhouse cheese at 17 Short's Gardens for decades: Monday to Wednesday 11:00–18:00, Thursday to Saturday 10:30–18:30, Sunday 11:00–17:00, card payment only, and no step-free access. Monmouth Coffee opened its first shop at 27 Monmouth Street and has been roasting since 1978; our page on finding good coffee in London covers the field it helped create. Both firms also keep working arches in Bermondsey, which is why they turn up in our guide to the Bermondsey taprooms.
- Walk-in restaurants. Several of the rooms around the Dials take no reservations at all, including the pizza place in Neal's Yard itself, which states plainly that it works on a walk-in basis every day of the week. Our page on London restaurants that refuse bookings explains how the queues work.
For something cheaper than any of them, our list of cheap eats has options within five minutes' walk, and the area is well supplied after dark, as our guide to London in the evening sets out.
Getting there, and what lies beyond
Covent Garden is the closest Underground station but it is small, deep and frequently queued at the lifts; Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road are both about five minutes away on foot and usually faster in practice. Our page on stations it is quicker to walk between explains why that is true of this corner of London more than almost anywhere else.
From the Dials, everything is within ten minutes. West across Charing Cross Road is Soho, with Carnaby Street beyond it. South is Leicester Square and theatreland. East along Long Acre brings you to the London Transport Museum. The second-hand and vintage shops on and around Earlham Street are part of the trade covered in our guide to vintage shopping, and the junction earns its place among the city's free things to do, since looking at it costs nothing.
The buildings around the seven streets carry a dense set of commemorative plaques, including some put up by the Trust rather than by the official scheme; our page on London's blue plaques explains the difference between the various colours and shapes you will see.
Frequently asked questions
Why does the Seven Dials pillar have only six sundials?
Because Thomas Neale's original plan had six streets, and the pillar was designed to match. A seventh street was added later to increase the ground rents, but by then a seventh dial face could not be fitted to the column. The traditional explanation is that the column itself served as the seventh dial.
Is the Seven Dials column the original one?
No. The original, carved by Edward Pierce in 1693–94, was removed in 1773 and its stones now stand on Weybridge Green in Surrey as a memorial to the Duchess of York. What you see at the junction is a careful reconstruction, unveiled on 29 June 1989 by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.
Does the Seven Dials sundial show the right time?
It shows apparent solar time at that spot, which is correct but is not clock time. Add an hour during British Summer Time, and allow up to about a quarter of an hour either way for the natural drift between solar and clock time through the year. A plaque at the junction gives the conversion.
How do you get into Neal's Yard?
Through one of two narrow covered passages, one off Short's Gardens and one off Monmouth Street. Both are easy to walk past, since they look like service entrances rather than the way into a courtyard. The yard itself is tiny and needs only a few minutes.
Is Seven Dials worth visiting if I have already seen Covent Garden?
Yes, and it is a five-minute walk. The Piazza is a covered market with street performers; Seven Dials is a seventeenth-century street plan with independent shops, a food hall and a monument with a genuinely odd history. It is also markedly less crowded on a Saturday afternoon.
Sources
- The Seven Dials Trust - Seven Dials: its history (checked September 2026)
- The Seven Dials Trust - The seven streets of Seven Dials (checked September 2026)
- The Seven Dials Trust - The original sundial pillar (checked September 2026)
- The Seven Dials Trust - Orientating for sundial time (checked September 2026)
- The Seven Dials Trust - The unveiling ceremony, 29 June 1989 (checked September 2026)
- The Seven Dials Trust - Topping in and the time capsule (checked September 2026)
- Seven Dials Market - traders and opening hours (checked September 2026)
- Neal's Yard Dairy - shop locations and hours (checked September 2026)