Sigurdur Nordal - Short Answers

Piccadilly

Posted on September 15th, 2008 by Sigurdur Nordal.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Piccadilly Circus is a famous traffic intersection in the West End of London in the City of Westminster. Piccadilly actually refers to the name of the street. The area has been described as both “relentlessly futuristic” and “a carefully preserved fragment of 19th-century London” (Jacob). As such, Piccadilly connects London’s future and its past, making it an anomaly in Westminster, which is London’s most conservative borough. At the futuristic end of things, a “giant, curved, super-bright and super-smooth TV screen” has recently been installed; it “curves around the Regency architecture” of the past, lighting up the night sky in a modern way that the old neon it is replacing never could. Yet Piccadilly cannot escape its past either. It has been a very busy intersection since it was first constructed in 1819. “It’s like Piccadilly Circus” is a phrase commonly used in the United Kingdom to refer to a place which is bustling with people. In America we would say, “It’s like Grand Central Station.”

0 comments.