Place Name
Built on top of an ancient highway in 1887 and so-named as it led to the long-lost cross at Charing, the last and most expensive of the 12 crosses ordered by King Edward I to mark the route for the funeral cortege of Queen Eleanor on its slow journey to London, after her death in Lincoln in 1290. The name Charing itself comes from the Old English word cierring which refers to a bend in the River Thames, or, as A D Mills in A Dictionary of London Place Names suggests, more likely a bend in the old Roman road from London to the West. There is known to have been a village here by the name of Cyrringe as early as about 1000, it was first recorded as Charryncrosse in 1360. The cross stood at the junction of the present Strand and Northumberland Avenue, and was destroyed in 1647 during the Puritan fervour for demolishing all monuments of superstition or idolatry. The section of the street north of Cambridge Circus, which in 1690 was called Hog Lane, follows an ancient highway which was a continuation of St Martin’s Lane. It formed the area’s eastern boundary with the slum area of St Giles. By the time Horwood produced his plan in about 1792, the street had been renamed Crown Street, which in turn was replaced in the 19thCentury by the much wider and straighter Charing Cross Road which cut through the slum to provide a more direct route to Charing Cross. The road was officially opened by the Duke of Cambridge on February 26, 1887 having finals been completed by the Metropolitan Board of Works after years of wrangling. The new highway cut a swathe through Soho’s tangle of small roads, yards and alleys that made the journey from Oxford Street to “the western centre of London” so tortuous. To mark the occasion the Board, meeting two weeks later, had considered changing the name of the new road to honour the prince but decided against it on the grounds that there were too many streets named after Cambridge already, so instead agreed to settle on naming this junction after him.
