Goad London 217—W1—Mayfair—Carnaby & Regent Streets—Savile Row 1948 (1970) map

Charles Goad Insurance Plan of London, sheet 217 [Regent Street, Savile Row, Heddon Street and Carnaby Street]

Goad's fire insurance plan of London, sheet 217, covers Regent Street, Savile Row and Carnaby Street (W1). Carnaby Street was a shabby rag-trade backstreet until John Stephen's boutiques made it Swinging London's showpiece, and it was pedestrianised in October 1973. The basement club marked at 9 Kingly Street is the Bag O'Nails site, where the Jimi Hendrix Experience played two shows on 11 January 1967. The club was still hosting bands in 1970; a much later revival as a private members' club ran from 2013 to 2018. The Bag O'Nails was also where Paul McCartney met his future wife, the photographer Linda Eastman, in 1967. No. 3 Savile Row, marked “Offices”, was the Beatles’ Apple Corps headquarters and the setting for their final public performance, the rooftop concert of 30 January 1969. Apple Corps plans to open a Beatles visitor attraction there in 2027. Nearby, 23 Heddon Street provided the setting for David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album cover photograph in 1972. On the sheet, woollen warehouses around Golden Square and John Heathcoat's net and silk premises near Savile Row show the working textile district that then lay behind Regent Street's fashionable shopfronts. Today those streets are known for shopping and dining. The New Gallery Evangelistic Centre, then a church in a former Regent Street cinema, has been Burberry's flagship since 2012. The sheet also names the Church of the Assumption on Warwick Street, Mappin & Webb, and Miss Selfridge, whose shops closed in 2021. Goad's plans were made to assess property and fire risk, and they were corrected with pasted overlays recording new uses, altered layouts, demolition and rebuilding. The latest dated correction is October 1970, and a separate pencil working note is dated November 1974. The sheet was resurveyed and reissued in November 1948, with a 1950 copyright date, and the key plan acquired with…