PICCADILLY

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 3308, 30 March 1926, Page 12

PICCADILLY

HOW IT GOT ITS NAME. "Any book by Mr Kingsford, the most careful and erudite historian of London before the Fire, at once takes an authoritative place. He has gone farther West than is usual with him. and to good purpose. A map drawn in 1555, and the papers of a lawsuit for which it was prepared, give him new material; the former shows the area from Charing Cross and St. Giles’s to Berkeley square and Cavendish square, when it was all fields, intersected by a few rural ways which are now fashionable residential streets,” says a writer in the ‘‘Daily Telegraph.’’ ‘‘Mr Kingsford admits failure in his search for a definite origin of ‘Piccadilly.” but thinks it lies in the nickname. Pickadilly Hall, given in derision to the imposing home built by Robert Baker, a tailor, whose fortune had been made by the sale of pickadillies, the decoration around the hem of the ornate .garments worn by our forefathers. In like merry mood, ‘.Shaver's Hall’ was the style given by the West End bloods to the house of a wealthy barber’s magnificence.”