Piccadilly Circus, W1

John Schlesinger’s 1965 satire Darling in Piccadilly Circus, with an old woman singing Santa Lucia on the steps of the statue of Eros, after Princess Diana (Julie Christie) has returned with her Italian prince to virtual exile in Rome.

Since the need to ease traffic congestion meant sidelining the famous statue from its central island to the pedestrianised area in front of the Criterion Theatre, the Circus has lost much of its visual impact. Truth be told, though, it was never as familiar a cinematic backdrop as New York’s Times Square. The muffed postal drop in John Wayne’s only UK movie, Brannigan, centres around an unlikely postbox situated on a traffic island, beneath which the villains manage to vanish into the sewers.

Another Wayne, Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers), with his pal Garth (Dana Carvey) – and surely not a pair of cheap lookalikes filmed by a Second Unit – fetch up here, searching for the legendary roadie in Wayne’s World 2. The Circus’ trademark illuminated signs flash up diary entries in Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Most memorably perhaps, it took the unstoppable gung-ho enthusiasm of John Landis to stage mayhem in the heart of the capital. Part of the building now housing ubiquitous clothes store Gap, on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue, used to be the Eros News Cinema, where David Kessler (David Naughton) is nagged by his undead victims in An American Werewolf in London. As the werewolf tears through the cinema’s security doors at the movie’s climax, major traffic chaos ensues. For the first time ever, Piccadilly Circus was closed for filming on two successive nights, albeit in the wee, small hours. Nevertheless, much of the complex sequence was shot on a backlot recreation of the Circus at Twickenham Studios (look for the wobbly street sign!).

More recently, Jim (Cillian Murphy) finds the Eros statue boarded up and covered with desperate messages as he wanders through a deserted West End in 28 Days Later...

Before its current incarnation as Virgin Records, the building to the west of the Circus between Piccadilly and Regent Street was the sedate department store Swan and Edgar, where Deniston Russell (Alastair Sim) deliberately tries to get himself arrested for shoplifting (in order to satisfy the conditions of a mischievous will) in the 1951 comedy Laughter in Paradise. Outside the shop, Julie Christie buys up a pile of Evening Standards after her little publicity coup in Darling.

Trivia: the winged statue, commonly called Eros, isn't Eros at all. Officially the fountain, erected in 1893 to commemorate the philanthropic Victorian Lord Shaftesbury, is the Shaftesbury Monument Memorial Fountain and the figure is often claimed to be ‘The Angel of Christian Charity’. In fact, the sculptor intended it to be Anteros (anti-Eros), the twin brother of the little cherub with the bow. Instead of causing people to fall in love, he specialises in returning love, and punishes those who scorn the love of others.

An American Werewolf In London (1981, dir: John Landis)
28 Days Later... (2002, dir: Danny Boyle)
Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001, dir: Sharon Maguire)
Darling (1965, dir: John Schlesinger)
Brannigan (1975, dir: Douglas Hickox)
Laughter In Paradise (1951, dir: Mario Zampi)
Wayneís World 2 (1993, dir: Stephen Surjik)