Behind the National Gallery is the National Portrait Gallery, opened in 1896, and opposite to it St. Martin's Town Hall, with the parish emblem--St. Martin dividing his cloak with a beggar--in bas-relief on the frontage.
Charing Cross Road is very modern. It was opened in 1887, and swept over a number of narrow courts and alleys.
In this is the Public Library, where some watercolours and old prints of vanished houses are hung on the staircase. There is also the eighteenth-century plan from Strype's Survey, well worth studying.
Leicester Square, at first known as Leicester Fields, is associated with the Sidneys, Earls of Leicester, who had a town-house on the north side, where the Empire Music-hall is now. This was a large brick building, with a courtyard before it and a Dutch garden at the back. During the reign of Charles I. and in the time of the Commonwealth the Sidneys tenanted it, but later it was occupied by foreign Ambassadors. Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, took it in 1662, and afterwards it was aptly described by Pennant as "the pouting-place of Princes"; for George, son of George I., established here a rival Court when he had quarrelled with his father, and his son Frederick, the Prince of Wales, did precisely the same thing. During the latter tenancy a large building adjoining, called Savile or Ailesbury House, was amalgamated with Leicester House. George III. was living here when hailed King. Savile House stood until the Gordon Riots, when it was completely stripped and gutted by the rioters. The square was presented to the public in 1874 by Baron Albert Grant, M.P. The gift is recorded on the pedestal of the statue of Shakespeare standing in the centre.
The square was for long a favourite place for duels. A line drawn diagonally from the north-east to the south-west corner roughly indicates the boundary of St Martin's parish, the upper half of the square being in St. Anne's, Soho.
The associations of this part are numerous and very interesting. The busts of the four men standing in the corners of the centre garden have all some local connection. They are those of Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Hunter. Hogarth's house was on the east, on the site of Tenison's School, and next to it was that of John Hunter, the famous surgeon. Sir Joshua Reynolds bought No. 47 on the west side in 1760, and lived in it until his death. Sir Isaac Newton lived in the little street off the south side of the square, at the back of the big new Dental Hospital. His house is still standing, and bears a tablet of the Society of Arts. It is quite unpretentious--a stucco-covered building with little dormer-windows in the roof. The great scientist came here in 1710, when he was nearly sixty, and his fame was then world-wide. Men from all parts of Europe sought the dull little street in order to converse with one whose power had wrought a revolution in the methods of scientific thought. In the same house Miss Burney afterwards lived with her father. Sir Thomas Lawrence took apartments at No. 4, Leicester Square, in 1786, when only seventeen, but he had already begun to exhibit at the Royal Academy. The square was for long a favourite place of residence with foreigners, and has not even yet lost a slightly un-English aspect.