Arts Theatre

The Agatha Christie Memorial is a memorial to author and playwright Agatha Christie, located at the intersection of Cranbourn Street and Great Newport Street by St Martin's Cross near Covent Garden, in London, United Kingdom.

The St Martin's Lane Academy, a precursor of the Royal Academy, was organised in 1735 by William Hogarth, from the circle of artists and designers who gathered at Slaughter's Coffee House at the upper end of St Martin's Lane, London. The artistic set that introduced the Rococo style to England was centred on "Old Slaughter's" and the drawing-classes at the St. Martin's Lane Academy were inextricably linked in the dissemination of new artistic ideas in England in the reigns of George II and George III.

Cranbourn Street is a street in Central London. It connects Leicester Square to Long Acre via Charing Cross Road. The street was constructed in the 1670s, and named after the Earl of Salisbury's country estate of Cranborne, Dorset. It originally connected Leicester Square to Castle Street, and was largely complete by 1681–2. William Hogarth served an apprenticeship in a shop on the street in 1713, and his two sisters were presumed to run a nearby linen-draper's shop.The street was widened in 1843, connecting Coventry Street to Long Acre. Cranbourn Passage, an alley connecting the street northwards to Little Newport Street, was demolished in the 1880s in order to construct Charing Cross Road. The London Hippodrome was sited on Cranbourn Street; in 1957 it was converted into the Talk of the Town, a combined theatre and restaurant. After the Talk of the Town closed in 1982, the Hippodrome was acquired by nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow who turned it into Stringfellow's, the UK's first 'super club.'

Old Slaughter's Coffee House was a coffee house in St Martin's Lane in London. Opened in 1692 by Thomas Slaughter, it was the haunt of many of the important personages of the period. The building was demolished in 1843 when Cranbourn Street was constructed.

On 12 October 1992, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) detonated a bomb that had been planted in the gents' toilets in the Sussex Arms pub in Upper St Martins Lane near Long Acre, London, killing a man and injuring seven other people.A telephone call to a radio station was made at 1:21 pm, nine minutes before the bomb exploded, saying a bomb had been placed "in the Leicester Square area"; a tourist-frequented spot nearby. The bomb exploded at 1:30pm, injuring eight people. One of the wounded - thirty-year-old nurse David Heffer - died from his injuries in hospital. It was the eighth IRA bomb in London in a six day period.It was the first IRA pub bombing in England to kill people since the November 1974 Birmingham pub bombings, and the first IRA pub bombing in Britain causing injuries since the Hare and Hounds pub bombing in Lower Boxley Road in Kent in September 1975, when two police officers were injured in an IRA car bombing.

Dishoom is a small Bombay-inspired restaurant group with locations throughout the UK.Evoking the Irani cafés which were popular across Bombay in the 1960s, Dishoom was founded in 2010 by co-founders Shamil Thakrar and Kavi Thakrar. The first Dishoom café opened in Covent Garden in 2010. As of 2022, there are eight Dishoom restaurants open around the United Kingdom, with locations in London, Edinburgh, Manchester and Birmingham.In 2020 Dishoom expanded their offering, introducing the Dishoom online store to sit alongside their restaurants. Selling meal kits, preserves, signature cocktails and gifts, the Dishoom Store allows customers to order popular dishes from Dishoom restaurants to cook at home.

West End theatre is mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres in and near the West End of London. Along with New York City's Broadway theatre, West End theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world. Seeing a West End show is a common tourist activity in London.There are a total of 38 theatres in the West End, with the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, opened in May 1663, the oldest theatre in London. The Savoy Theatre – built as a showcase for the popular series of comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan – was entirely lit by electricity in 1881.The Society of London Theatre (SOLT) announced that 2018 was a record year for the capital's theatre industry with attendances topping 15.5 million for the first time since the organisation began collecting audience data in 1986. Box office revenues exceeded £765 million. While attendance in 2019 was down 1.4% compared to the previous year, box office revenues reached a record £799 million. Famous screen actors, British and international alike, frequently appear on the London stage.The majority of West End theatres are owned by the Ambassador Theatre Group, Delfont Mackintosh Theatres, Nimax Theatres, LW Theatres, and the Nederlander Organization.

Leicester Square is a London Underground station in Theatreland and Chinatown, in the West End of London. It is located on Charing Cross Road, a short distance to the east of Leicester Square itself. The station is on the Charing Cross branch of the Northern line between Charing Cross and Tottenham Court Road, and the Piccadilly line, between Piccadilly Circus and Covent Garden. It is in Travelcard Zone 1.

St Martin's Theatre is a West End theatre which has staged the production of The Mousetrap since March 1974, making it the longest continuous run of any show in the world. The theatre is located in West Street, near Shaftesbury Avenue, in the West End of London. It was designed by W. G. R. Sprague as one of a pair of theatres, along with the Ambassadors Theatre, also in West Street. Richard Verney, 19th Baron Willoughby de Broke, together with B. A. (Bertie) Meyer, commissioned Sprague to design the theatre buildings. Although the Ambassadors opened in 1913, construction of the St Martin's was delayed by the outbreak of the First World War. The theatre is still owned by the present Lord Willoughby de Broke and his family. The first production at the St Martin's was the spectacular Edwardian musical comedy Houp La!, starring Gertie Millar, which opened on 23 November 1916. The producer was the impresario Charles B. Cochran, who took a 21-year lease on the new theatre.Many famous British actors passed through the St Martin's. In April 1923 Basil Rathbone played Harry Domain in R.U.R. and in June 1927 Henry Daniell appeared there as Gregory Brown in Meet the Wife. Successes at the theatre included Hugh Williams's play (later a film) The Grass is Greener, John Mortimer's The Wrong Side of the Park, and in 1970 the thriller Sleuth which starred Marius Goring for a long run as Andrew Wyke. After Cochran, Bertie Meyer ran the theatre intermittently until 1967, when his son R. A. (Ricky) Meyer became administrator for the next two decades. The St Martin's was Grade II listed by English Heritage in March 1973.In March 1974 Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap transferred from the Ambassadors to the St Martin's, where it continued its run until the 16th of March 2020 when the show had to be suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, holding the record for the longest continuously running show in the world. It has exceeded 26,000 performances at the St Martin's.

The Noël Coward Theatre, formerly known as the Albery Theatre, is a West End theatre in St. Martin's Lane in the City of Westminster, London. It opened on 12 March 1903 as the New Theatre and was built by Sir Charles Wyndham behind Wyndham's Theatre which was completed in 1899. The building was designed by the architect W. G. R. Sprague with an exterior in the classical style and an interior in the Rococo style. In 1973 it was renamed the Albery Theatre in tribute to Sir Bronson Albery who had presided as its manager for many years. Since September 2005, the theatre has been owned by Delfont-Mackintosh Ltd. It underwent major refurbishment in 2006, and was renamed the Noël Coward Theatre when it re-opened on 1 June 2006. The building is now a Grade II Listed structure.

Charing Cross Road is a street in central London running immediately north of St Martin-in-the-Fields to St Giles Circus (the intersection with Oxford Street) and then becomes Tottenham Court Road. It leads from the north in the direction of Charing Cross at the south side of Trafalgar Square. It connects via St Martin's Place and the motorised east side of the square.

Henderson's, better known as The Bomb Shop, was a bookshop at 66 Charing Cross Road, London known for publishing and selling both radical left and anarchist writing and modernist literature. The shop was founded in 1909, and was a father and son operation run by Francis Riddell Henderson, formerly the London representative of Walter Scott Publishing. The shop was bought by Eva Collet Reckitt, and became the first of the Collet's chain of left-wing bookshops.