Piccadilly Circus in the context of "Regent Street"

Shaftesbury Avenue is a major road in the West End of London, named after The 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. It runs north-easterly from Piccadilly Circus to New Oxford Street, crossing Charing Cross Road at Cambridge Circus. From Piccadilly Circus to Cambridge Circus, it is in the City of Westminster, and from Cambridge Circus to New Oxford Street, it is in the London Borough of Camden.

Shaftesbury Avenue was built between 1877 and 1886 by the architect George Vulliamy and the engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette, to provide a north–south traffic artery through the crowded districts of St. Giles and Soho.

Piccadilly (/ˌpɪkəˈdɪli/) is a road in the City of Westminster, London, England, to the south of Mayfair, between Hyde Park Corner in the west and Piccadilly Circus in the east. It is part of the A4 road that connects central London to Hammersmith, Earl's Court, Heathrow Airport and the M4 motorway westward. St James's is to the south of the eastern section, while the western section is built up only on the northern side. Piccadilly is just under 1 mile (1.6 km) in length, and it is one of the widest and straightest streets in central London.

The street has been a main thoroughfare since at least medieval times, and in the Middle Ages was known as "the road to Reading" or "the way from Colnbrook". Around 1611 or 1612, Robert Baker acquired land in the area, and prospered by making and selling piccadills. Shortly after purchasing the land, he enclosed it and erected several dwellings, including his home, Pikadilly Hall. What is now Piccadilly was named Portugal Street in 1663 after Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II, and grew in importance after the road from Charing Cross to Hyde Park Corner was closed to allow the creation of Green Park in 1668. Some of the most notable stately houses in London were built on the northern side of the street during this period, including Clarendon House and Burlington House in 1664. Berkeley House, constructed around the same time as Clarendon House, was destroyed by a fire in 1733 and rebuilt as Devonshire House in 1737 by William Cavendish, 3rd Duke of Devonshire. It was later used as the main headquarters for the Whig party. Burlington House has since been home to several noted societies, including the Royal Academy of Arts, the Geological Society of London, the Linnean Society, and the Royal Astronomical Society. Several members of the Rothschild family had mansions at the western end of the street. St James's Church was consecrated in 1684 and the surrounding area became St James Parish.

51°30′42″N 0°8′14″W / 51.51167°N 0.13722°W / 51.51167; -0.13722

Golden Square, in Soho, the City of Westminster, is a mainly hardscaped garden square planted with a few mature trees and raised borders in Westminster flanked by classical office buildings. Its four approach ways are north and south but it is centred 125 metres east of Regent Street and double that NNE of Piccadilly Circus. A small block south is retail/leisure street Brewer Street. The square and its buildings have featured in many works of literature and host many media, advertising and public relations companies that characterise its neighbourhood within Soho.

Pea soup fog (also known as a pea souper, black fog or killer fog) is a very thick and often greenish-yellow fog caused by air pollution that contains tarry soot particulates and the poisonous gas sulphur dioxide. This very thick smog occurs in cities and is derived from the smoke given off by the burning of soft coal for home heating and in industrial processes. Smog of this intensity is often lethal to vulnerable people such as the elderly, infants, and those with respiratory problems. The result of these phenomena was commonly known as a London particular or London fog; in a reversal of the idiom, "London particular" became the name for a thick pea and ham soup.

Haymarket is a street in the St James's area of the City of Westminster. It runs from Piccadilly Circus in the north to Pall Mall at the southern end. Located on the street are the Theatre Royal, His Majesty's Theatre, New Zealand House, a cinema complex and restaurants.

The Piccadilly line is a deep-level London Underground line which runs between the west and the north of London with 53 stations on the line. The line serves Heathrow Airport, and some of its stations are near tourist attractions in Central London such as King's Cross, Piccadilly Circus and Buckingham Palace. It has two western branches which split at Acton Town, with the main one towards Heathrow Airport terminals and the other northern branch towards Uxbridge. The District and Metropolitan lines share some sections of track with the Piccadilly line. The line is printed in dark blue (officially "Corporate Blue", Pantone 072) on the Tube map. It is the sixth-busiest line on the Underground network, with nearly 218 million passenger journeys in 2019.

The first section, between Finsbury Park and Hammersmith, was opened in 1906 as the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway (GNP&BR). The station tunnels and buildings were designed by Leslie Green, featuring ox-blood terracotta facades with semi-circular windows on the first floor. When Underground Electric Railways of London (UERL) took over the line, it was renamed the Piccadilly line. Subsequent extensions were made to Cockfosters, Hounslow West and Uxbridge in the early 1930s, when many existing stations on the Uxbridge and Hounslow branches were rebuilt to designs by Charles Holden of the Adams, Holden & Pearson architectural practice. These were generally rectangular, with brick bases and large tiled windows, topped with a concrete slab roof. The western extensions took over certain existing District line services, which were fully withdrawn in 1964.

Neon lighting consists of brightly glowing, electrified glass tubes or bulbs that contain rarefied neon or other gases. Neon lights are a type of cold cathode gas-discharge light. A neon tube is a sealed glass tube with a metal electrode at each end, filled with one of a number of gases at low pressure. A high potential of several thousand volts applied to the electrodes ionizes the gas in the tube, causing it to emit colored light. The color of the light depends on the gas in the tube. Neon lights were named for neon, a noble gas which gives off a popular orange light, but other gases and chemicals called phosphors are used to produce other colors, such as hydrogen (purple-red), helium (yellow or pink), carbon dioxide (white), and mercury (blue). Neon tubes can be fabricated in curving artistic shapes, to form letters or pictures. They are mainly used to make dramatic, multicolored glowing signage for advertising, called neon signs, which were popular from the 1920s to 1960s and again in the 1980s.

The term can also refer to the miniature neon glow lamp, developed in 1917, about seven years after neon tube lighting. While neon tube lights are typically meters long, the neon lamps can be less than one centimeter in length and glow much more dimly than the tube lights. They are still in use as small indicator lights. Through the 1970s, neon glow lamps were widely used for numerical displays in electronics, for small decorative lamps, and as signal processing devices in circuitry. While these lamps are now antiques, the technology of the neon glow lamp developed into contemporary plasma displays and televisions.