Place Name
The Ham & Windmill Tavern, now the Lyric, on the corner with Great Windmill Street. The tavern was here by about 1730 and renamed in 1892. The yard, which appears on John Rocque’s 1746 map of London, occupies the exact site of a long lost Tudor windmill (hence Great Windmill Street, and the windmill part of the name), which is described by Gillian Bebbington in London Street Names as a tall brick windmill probably built in about 1560 with long sails prominent on maps of the next hundred years. It survived up until about 1780. It isn’t known where the ham part comes from. By 1952, says musician and nightclub owner Jack Glicco in Madness After Midnight, which lifts the lid on Soho’s clubs and sex scene during the years before and after the Second World War, Ham Yard had became known as Blood Pit on account of the extensive bomb damage it sustained during the war giving rise to a flourishing black market and general atmosphere of desperation, exploitation and viciousness.
