Bow Street is a thoroughfare in Covent Garden, Westminster, London. It features as one of the streets on the standard London Monopoly board.
The area around Bow Street was developed by Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford in the 1630s. Oliver Cromwell moved to Bow Street in 1645. Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford was born there in 1661. No. 4 served as a magistrates' court from 1739 and the Bow Street Runners were founded there by Henry Fielding in the 1740s. When the Metropolitan Police Service was established in 1829, a station house was sited at numbers 25 and 27. The former Bow Street Magistrates' Court and police station was completed in 1881 and closed in 2006. The building is to be converted into a boutique hotel.
Bow Street is also the site of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden.
Famous quotes containing the words bow and/or street:
“Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,
The signet of its all-enslaving power,
Upon a shining ore, and called it gold:
Before whose image bow the vulgar great,
The vainly rich, the miserable proud,
The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings,
And with blind feelings reverence the power
That grinds them to the dust of misery.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very barroom of the mind’s inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,—the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’ shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)