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This well-established route used to approach a French Protestant chapel which was built at the corner with Sheraton Street (then called Little Chapel Street) in 1694, as seen on John Rocque’s 1746 map of London. The chapel was used by the local French Huguenot population which had arrived in Britain from around 1685 to escape the religious persecutions under King Louis XIV. Many settled in Soho, which had already acquired a reputation as a place of refuge for foreigners. Rather than implying any particular grandeur or importance in a street, the prefix ‘Great’ generally indicated the presence of a corresponding ‘Little’ street in the neighbourhood, in this case Little Chapel Street. Many ‘Great’ streets were renamed in the late 1930s by the London County Council which attempted to remove all prefixed names from the London Directory. Usually the prefix was just removed. Those that survived did so because removing them was deemed to be harmful to City businessmen or destructive of historical interest. The chapel itself was demolished exactly 200 years after it was established to make way for Novello’s printing works which has also since disappeared.
