Charing Cross

Stand for a moment at the southern edge of Trafalgar Square and listen. Buses grind their gears. Taxis brake and pull away. Feet slap the pavement in every direction at once. This busy knot of roads, where the Strand, Whitehall and Cockspur Street all meet, is Charing Cross. It may look like just another London junction. But for centuries this small patch of ground has been treated as the very centre of the city.

Start with the name, because it holds two stories. The word Charing most likely comes from the Old English word cierring, which means a turn or a bend. It probably refers to the great curve of the River Thames, which swings around just south of here. Before London grew over it, this spot was a small village called Charing. It sat on the road between the City of London and the royal centre at Westminster.

The second half of the name, Cross, comes from a love story and a funeral. In 1290, Queen Eleanor of Castile died in the English Midlands. She was the wife of King Edward the First. The grieving king ordered her body carried south to Westminster Abbey for burial. At each place where the funeral procession stopped overnight, he later raised a tall stone cross in her memory.

There were twelve of these monuments in total, and they became known as the Eleanor crosses. The last and grandest stood here, at the village of Charing, the final resting place before the Abbey. Here is a small surprise. You may hear people say that Charing comes from the French words chère reine, meaning dear queen. It is a lovely idea... but it is a myth. The village already had its name before Eleanor died.

The original cross did not survive. In the 1640s, England fell into civil war between King Charles the First and Parliament. Many Puritans, who were strict Protestants, saw religious monuments like this as idolatry. In 1647, Parliament ordered the cross at Charing to be pulled down. Only three of the twelve Eleanor crosses still stand today, and all of them are outside London, at Geddington, Hardingstone and Waltham Cross.

Now look at the spot where the medieval cross once stood. Today it holds a bronze statue of a man on horseback. This is King Charles the First, the same king who lost that civil war. The French sculptor Hubert Le Sueur cast the statue in the early 1630s. It shows the king in armour, calm and upright, his horse in mid-stride.

The statue has a remarkable survival story. After the king's defeat, Parliament wanted it destroyed. According to a popular tale, it was sold to a metalworker named John Rivet, who was told to melt it down. Instead, the story goes, he buried it in secret. He then sold small brass trinkets, claiming they were made from the king's statue. Whether every detail is true is hard to say. What we do know is that the statue survived, and after the monarchy returned, it was set up here in the 1670s.

Notice which way the king is facing. He looks south, straight down the long, wide avenue of Whitehall. At the far end of that view stands the Banqueting House. In 1649, Charles the First walked out onto a scaffold outside that building and was beheaded. So the bronze king gazes forever toward the place of his own execution. Few people walking past ever make that connection.

This junction has a darker past, too. For centuries, Charing Cross was a place of public punishment. There was a pillory here, a wooden frame that locked a person's head and hands while crowds jeered. And in 1660, after the monarchy was restored, several of the men who had signed the death warrant of Charles the First were executed near this very spot. The busy crossing you see today was once a stage for public justice.

Here is the second surprise. When London road signs tell you that a town is so many miles from London, the distance is traditionally measured from right here. Look behind the statue of Charles the First, and you can find a small plaque in the pavement. It marks this as the official central point from which distances to London are measured. In a sprawling city with no single centre, this spot quietly settles the question.

Now turn east, toward the Strand, and look across at the forecourt of Charing Cross railway station. In front of it stands a tall, pointed stone spire, covered in carved figures and Gothic details. This is not the original Eleanor cross. It is a Victorian replica, put up in the 1860s when the station and its hotel were built. Its designer, the architect Edward Middleton Barry, imagined what the lost medieval cross might have looked like.

The railway station itself opened in the 1860s and still carries trains toward Kent and the southeast of England. The grand building on its front was built as the Charing Cross Hotel, for travellers arriving in the capital. Later in the nineteenth century, a new street was cut north from here toward Oxford Street. It became Charing Cross Road, and for generations it was famous across the world for its bookshops.

So the name Charing Cross now belongs to many things at once. It is a junction, a station, a street, an underground stop and a hospital that began nearby. But all of these share one source: a grieving king, a small village on a bend of the river, and a stone cross raised more than seven hundred years ago.

Before you move on, take one more look around. The bronze king still faces down Whitehall. Pigeons settle on the rooftops above Trafalgar Square. Traffic flows around the statue just as carts and carriages did before it. As you walk away, keep an eye out for that Victorian spire by the station. It stands as a quiet reminder of a queen whose last journey passed through this very ground.