The district of Fitzrovia straddles the City of Westminster and the London Borough of Camden.
It's 1 mile from the centre of London; Charing Cross, and is sandwiched between Tottenham Court Road and Euston Road.
2nd Duke of Grafton, Charles FitzRoy, purchased the Manor of Tottenham Court with surrounding Tottenhall
and built Fitzroy Square for aristocratic families, mostly designed by architect Robert Adam and erected by Robert's two brothers in 1798.
The façade is made of Portland Stone, a type of stone quarried from the Isle of Portland in Dorset.
Charles gave his name to the square along with Fitzroy Street. His grandson,
1st Baron Southampton, later developed the northern portions of the district.
The 189m concrete BT Tower was commissioned by the General Post Office,
and took 5 years of construction at a cost of £2.5 million.
When it opened in 1966, a million visitors came that year to marvel at the structure
famously overtaking the Millbank Tower as the tallest building in the UK.
The first 16 floors were originally used for power and housing technical equipment.
The slimmer 35-metre section above that held the microwave aerials used to transmit telecommunications traffic across the country
and all that was topped off with a revolving restaurant on the 34th floor
providing panoramic City views and making one revolution every 23 minutes.
Most of the building is covered in a special tint to prevent heat build-up
and the narrow cylindrical shape was chosen to limit the building shifting anymore than 10 inches in the wind.
Its height was surpassed by the NatWest Tower in 1980.
The national communications being sent across the network were so important;
the building's very existence was declared an official state secret for years.
One university student won a race up the stairs in 4 minutes and 46 seconds.
The high-speed lifts will get you to the 'Top of the Tower' within 30 seconds at 16 mph.
At turn of the century, a display made up of over half a million LED lights
in 177 vertical strips wrapped themselves around the 36th and 37th floors to form the "Information Band".
Its the largest of this display type on the planet and has to be switched off at 10.30pm each night to conserve resources.
Fitzrovia has about 8,000 residents. 1,500 are over 65, 1000 of them live in student halls of residence
and about 40 are homeless and sleeping rough on the streets.
The Saint Charles Borromeo is a Roman Catholic Church on Ogle Street
in the Diocese of Westminster named after a 16th-century Italian saint.
The architect; Samuel Joseph Nicholl, designed the outside in a Gothic Revival style.
It was built in 1862 and opened the next year at a cost of £4000 pounds
sitting on land that was gifted by an anonymous donor.
Attendant’s co-founders, Ryan and Bosh, want quality brunch cafés serving fresh, local and ethically sourced food.
Their first site is in this disused Victorian toilet. They pay higher prices for their coffee beans based on its quality
and they're skilful roasting, releases the inherent flavour of the beans,
honouring the hard work the farmers and growers put in on the field.
Since opening in 2013, the Attendant has developed into a coffee roastery, café and kitchen,
with the intention of bringing permaculture to the UK café scene.
As districts go, this one has close to the lowest rate of car ownership in the UK
yet close to the highest level of car pollution in the UK.
The residents have 6 immediately surrounding tubes stations to pick from
and 5 TfL Cycle Hire stations, but most simply walk to get around.
Until the 1930's, the manor of Tottenham Court and its immediate surroundings were known as London's Old Latin Quarter.
This was popularised by a book of the same name authored by Edwin Beresford Chancellor.
Although the area was built for the upper classes, they soon migrated to Belgravia and Mayfair,
forcing subdivision of their buildings into workshops, studios and rooms to let.
Regarded by many at that time as a northern extension of Soho, many just called it 'the other side of Oxford Street'.
Diligent efforts took place to stop ill-judged attempts from property developers in rebranding the area ‘Noho’.
Most of the poets, writers, vagabonds and heavy drinkers couldn't afford to live in Soho.
A rackety crowd from the Café Royal then gravitated here as a consolation to follow their bohemian lifestyle.
Fitzroy Tavern started out as a Coffee House in 1883 before eventually being re-opened with its current name
by Russian tailor Judah Kleinfeld in 1919. It's named after the Fitzroy family but it is this pub
which made their surname well-known and actually gave the district of Fitzrovia its title.
Following pressure from residents, the name Fitzrovia appeared for the first time on Ordnance Survey maps in 1994.
Iconic literary figures Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Jacob Epstein and George Bernard Shaw, to name only a few,
were all locals to the pub and were bound to have raised a few glasses there inside their bohemian lifestyles.
It forms the starting point of today's London Literary Pub Crawl to explore
where these giants of the literary world ate, drank, discussed, thought and worked.