Things you didn't know about... the West End

The West End has had some famous unreal residents
Sherlock Holmes' legendary West End address, 221b Baker Street, never actually existed, rather like Sherlock Holmes himself. Other fictional West End residents have included James Bond, Danger Mouse and Sexton Blake.

Let's all go down the Strand...
This celebrated West End street ran right beside the Thames before the construction of the Embankment. Hence its name: "strand" is Old English for a shore or beach.

Doctor, doctor... there's loads of doctors in the West End
Dentists and surgeons too—more than 3,000 medical people work privately here in the heart of the West End today. (Compared with just 20 doctors in 1860, and 1,500 at the birth of the NHS in 1948.)

But it's not just doctors in Harley Street
Famous Harley Street residents in the West End have included liberal Prime Minister Gladstone and artist Joseph Turner.

Speak your mind in the West End
Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park's al fresco platform for freethinkers, radicals, reformers, evangelists and people with bees in their bonnets, is a real institution. An 1872 Act legalised public speaking here in the West End, and the list of famous speakers includes Karl Marx, Lenin, the Pankhursts, George Orwell. Speakers' Corner used to hear the last words of those condemned to hang, and Cromwell's caged corpse was displayed here too.

It's not him, it's his brother!
Known as Eros by lovers, tourists and West Enders themselves, the aluminium Picadilly Circus statue is actually Anteros, playmate to brother Eros.

Squaring up to the West End challenge
Leicester Square, in the West End, used to be a popular venue for duelling. And it can count Hogarth, renowned for his disturbing paintings of London life, as a resident.

The West Home is home to a heyday....
The West End's Carnaby Street was one of the places to be in the swinging 1960s. The anarchic tone of trendy Mod stylists like Mary Quant and Lord John, individualistic fashion outlets and underground music bars attracted the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Small Faces.