Talk:Seven Dials, London

Comments

The column itself is the seventh dial = so only needs six faces.

Seven Dials remains one of outstanding examples of "shared space" in the UK, allowing an informal mixing of traffic flows with pedestrian activity. Ben Hamilton-Baillie

Seven Dials is also the name of a mystery book by Anne Perry in which some of the action is set in the Seven Dials area. Should we add a section on literary references? --CocoaZen 02:12, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

I believe Seven Dials is mentioned in the Stephen Stills song Treetop Flier, though I've seen it as "seven dial", "seven isles"...if anyone wants to research it and it perhaps add this mention, could they? Thanks. Zchris87v 17:41, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

I second the suggestion that a Literary Reference section be set up by someone more expert at these things. Included should be C.S. Forester's Lieutenant Hornblower (1951 Curtis Publishing) "A ship of war manned for active service was the most crowded place in the world - more crowded than the most rundown tenement in Seven Dials..." Trucker11 (talk) 11:51, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

Rename article to 'Seven Dials, London'

When there is an article about Seven Dials, Brighton why should this article be named without reference to the city it is located? I believe that 'seven dials' should be a redirection page to 'seven dials, london'. —— _D^an_d^or ⁱ_D (talk) 19:13, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

 Done - Disambiguation page from Seven Dials. Jimthing (talk) 17:09, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

That was an ill-considered move. The WP:PRIMARYTOPIC of "Seven Dials" is the neighbourhood in London, and a hatnote at Seven Dials, Brighton would have sufficed. Now there are several dozen entries, previously OK, linking to this disambiguation page. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:18, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Not ill-considered at all. The London area does not have sort of precedence on WP in the use of the name over the Brighton area; each is equally likely to be the term one may be searching for, along with others since added. Hence it should have been correct to begin with, instead of conflating the error across site. Jimthing (talk) 11:04, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Column description

“The sundial column was built with only six faces, with the column itself acting as the gnomon of the seventh dial.”

???

How does that work? Some description needed; maybe add to the useful section with the info on how to read the dials. 2A00:23C7:E284:CF00:4192:C75A:7E51:7ABC (talk) 12:18, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

There are 6 sundials on the column, and the column itself acts as the 7th thing that casts a shadow, thus forming the 7th dial. How would you propose to phrase that encyclopedically? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:45, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

"... where misery clings to misery for a little warmth ..."

The article says:

... The poet John Keats described the area as the last resort for the poor and the ill.

... where misery clings to misery for a little warmth, and want and disease lie down side-by-side, and groan together.

John Keats didn't write the quoted words, whatever the cited source may say. They were written by the author and poet Thomas Miller in Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present (1852). Immediately after those words, Miller went on to quote (in fact, slightly misquote) a couple of lines from Ode to a Nightingale, which I presume is how the error arose. Nor did Keats describe the area as "the last resort for the poor and the ill." (I have no idea where that came from – certainly not the cited source. Perhaps "the poor and the ill" is just a paraphrasing of "want and disease".)

As far as I'm aware, Keats never wrote anything at all about Seven Dials, which descended to its nadir more than two decades after his death. The description has undoubtedly been included in the article because it was believed to have been written by a world-famous poet. Given that almost no one has ever heard of Thomas Miller, is it even worth keeping that quote, while correcting the attribution and the rest of the introductory line? Russ London (talk) 17:09, 22 March 2023 (UTC)