Burlington Arcade

It all began with oysters. Londoners used to eat them as they walked along, throwing away the shells much as they do burger wrappers now. Lord George Cavendish, owner of Burlington House on Piccadilly (now the Royal Academy), was sick of shells littering his garden, and so in 1819 decided to open a shopping arcade down that side of his property to protect it from the ‘tossers’. Nearly 200 years later the place is thriving.

You can buy expensive watches and shoes, perfumes and scarves, wallets and pens. Fred Astaire would get ‘lost for days’ in the Burlington, having discovered it when an admirer bought him nine pairs of gold striped slippers there. In 1964 a group of masked men spent rather less time in the arcade, driving a Jaguar Mark X halfway along it, using sledgehammers to relieve the Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Association shop of £35,000 worth of jewellery, then reversing the car back out.