Street features
Every Covent Garden Street has its own history, some more desirable than others.
Please select street below and meet some of Covent Garden’s characters over the years.
- Please choose a street from the below -
Carey Street
Carey Street is named in memory of one of the Street's past residents, the wealthy nobleman Nicholas Carey but nowadays is very much a hub of the legal profession. The South side of Carey Street contains entrances to the cavernous warrens of The Royal Courts of Justice while the North pavement accommodates services to the legal profession: there is a bookshop, a stationer, a wig shop, barristers' chambers and a 'legalia' shop and to complete service provision to those hard-grafting lawyers there is a pub here too; The Seven Stars which, with its legal theme has stood here for more than 400 years.
Carey Street is perhaps most famous for the bankruptcy court also resident. It moved here from Westminster in the 1840s due to the escalating number of common law judges. It is because of this connection with bankruptcy that the street is known to wags as Queer Street, an approximate nadir to the familiar zenith of 'Easy Street'. Here 'queer' is being used as a reference to an antiquated slang meaning of the word of 'in financial straits'. The jury is still out on how queer might have come to mean this, suggestions include that it is a slurred corruption of Carey Street, another that it is a metaphoric reference to a crooked shape, more convincing is that it is a transmutation of the German Querstrasse (street running off at a right angle). These days you won't hear people asking directions to Queer Street, it is many a year since anyone actually called Carey Street Queer Street but the allusion captured public conscience and in casinos, racecourses and poker dens being in Queer Street is still a popular, jokey euphemism for a losing punt.
Carey Street is intrinsically linked to the legal profession and in the past famous people have lived or worked here. Henry Mayhew, founder of Punch, started out as errand boy in his father's legal practice 'very little to the satisfaction of any of the parties concerned'. The bankruptcy division is in the Thomas More building to the North of the main High Court building and the Statue of Sir Thomas More adorns the elbow of Carey Street and commemorates this remarkable man.
More was born in 1478 and during his lifetime he achieved an extraordinary amount. Scholarly tomes have been written about this great man but as an overview: he served as a page to Archbishop Morton, translated epic Latin and Greek poetry, qualified as a barrister, dedicated himself to the silent monastic discipline of The Carthusian Order, decided he wanted to marry and talk, so left the brotherhood, entered parliament at the age of 25, passed the required laws, became speaker of the house, supported Henry VII, opposed Henry VIII, got knighted, was committed to the Tower, and finally was beheaded on a very dubious treason charge. More's final triumph came 400 years after his death when he was canonized by Pope Pius XI.
Carey Street today is a scene of vibrant professionalism, court clerks, barristers and other legal types bustle about. No-one ever strolls.
An echo of the everyday bustle of Carey street is offered by Charles Dickens in his chronicles of the seedy underbelly of Victorian London. Bleak House and The Pickwick Papers are set in the environs of Carey Street In Pickwick Papers Dicken's offers this description of the bankruptcy court: 'In a lofty room, badly lighted and worse ventilated there sit one, two, three or four gentlemen in wigs with little writing desks before them; a box of barristers on their right hand; an enclosure of insolvent debtors on their left; and an inclined plane of the most especially dirty faces in their front. These gentlemen are the commissioners of the Insolvent Court and the place in which they sit is the Insolvent Court itself.
Today on Carey Street everyone always seems to be in a hurry and given the importance of the street in constitutional terms this may not be surprising. If however you do have the time for a mooch there are some interesting and historical sites, not least some of the smallest and most charming specialist shops in London.
