Lights out at Piccadilly Circus
Piccadilly Circus today (Lisa Nordbo Fiil) and with the Shaftesbury Memorial boarded up with advertisements during WWII
If you've braved the masses of turists around SoHo, you might have noticed that the famous screens of Piccadilly Circus are - not there anymore. Scaffolding now covers the worldknown corner, with advertisements, of course. The reason for the lights-out is that the six screens are being replaced by one big screen. The new, massive screen should be ready to light up the night in the fall of 2017.
"Circus" comes from the Latin word for "circle" and back in 1819, when the junction was first build, it was round. This changed when Shaftesbury Avenue, named after Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, was constructed.
The fountain in the middle of Piccadilly Circus is always in honor of Mr. Cooper, who was a politician and philanthropist. Perched on the top of the Shaftesbury Memorial is a figure commonly mistaken for Eros with his bow and arrow. It is, however, Anteros, the god of requited love, but he and Eros are members of the same group of love gods.
Romantic as the fountain's god might be, the Piccadilly Circus is more often associated with capitalism and tourism. It's location close to Regent Street and the West End makes it a busy hub and the advertisements has been used as a symbol of London in numerous movies and series.
The very first electrical advertisement was installed in 1908 and was an advert for Perrier. From then on until the reconstruction started in January this year, the illuminated billboards were only switched off on a handful of occasions: during WWII, to avoid helping the planes blitzing the city, the funeral of Winston Churchill and the funeral of Princess Diana.
