Even electrons and protons. His path can be traced only by the people he has pushed aside. Especially after dark. Gilbert spent five years considering ideas to celebrate the charitable life of the Earl of Shaftesbury, a philanthropist and social reformer, eventually deciding upon a fountain topped by the winged Anteros, the ancient Greek symbol of Selfless Love.
The name was the right choice. During World War 1 prostitution in the area vastly increased to meet the demand of servicemen home from the front. Despite the war ending in prostitution increased if anything between the wars and many of the restaurants were magnets to pimps and their prostitutes.
By WW2 with the arrival of the relatively well-off American GIs the number of prostitutions was said to have doubled. It was almost impossible to police with the black-out. Here and there may be seen queer creatures…an hermaphroditic creature with side-whiskers and painted eyelashes…Male dancewrs who walk like fugitives from the City of the Plain. Hard-features ambassadors from Lesbos and Sodom. The Trocadero closed for good in February In the s and s Piccadilly Circus was also the centre for drug addicts especially heroin addicts.
Once inside you descended to a gloomy catacomb where only the mice were healthy on their diet of theatrical greasepaint, which they shared with the cockroaches. We actors had to resort to oxygen inhalers on matinee days to keep us bubbling energetic for our merry romp. At the beginning of the s there were about known herion addicts in the whole country — most of whom got their drugs from the Boots 24 hour chemist on Piccadilly Circus.
There would be a queue at midnight everyone holding their prescription dated the next day. The biggest drug dealer of the time was Boots the Chemist which is still there on Piccadilly Circus. A nurse hurries from a late-night opening branch of Boots the Chemists with urgently needed drugs, Piccadilly Circus, London, The shop is next to the Criterion Theatre.
