With a layout resembling a spoked wheel, the cobbled streets of Seven Dials emits a unique and distinctive flavour of London. With a sundial pillar at its epicentre and a phalanx of interconnected streets, Seven Dials is the 300-year-old quirky and hip cousin to hedonistic Soho and cultured but snobbish Covent Garden.

The original layout of the Seven Dials area was designed by Master of the Mint Thomas Neale in the early 1690s. The original plan had six roads converging, although this was later increased to seven. The sundial pillar was built with only six faces, however, probably because of the original design. This number of roads was chosen in order to maximise the number of houses that could be built on the site. 

By the nineteenth century, Seven Dials had become one of the most notorious slums in London and part of the infamous St Giles Rookery. The original sundial column was removed in 1773 as a precaution against the increasingly drunken and rowdy neighbourhood full of thieves, prostitutes and the underclass. 

In Sketches by Boz (1839), Charles Dickens gave a vivid description of a rookery:

"Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper: every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two or even three ... filth everywhere — a gutter before the houses and a drain behind — clothes drying and slops emptying, from the windows; girls of fourteen or fifteen, with matted hair, walking about barefoot, and in white great-coats, almost their only covering; boys of all ages, in coats of all sizes and no coats at all; men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel, lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and swearing."

A replacement column was constructed in 1988/89, to the original design.

Today, Seven Dials is a prosperous and commercial area with Earlham Street Market selling flowers, fruit&veg and fashionable clothing.