How To Feel You’re In Italy Without Leaving London
Just 90 seconds from Holborn station (and seven minutes walk from Elizabeth Line Tottenham Court Road station), Sicilian Avenue offers visitors a chance to visit Italy without setting foot on a plane. Or at the very least, it lets you visit a rather idiosyncratic idea of Italy, which existed in the mind of one highly creative Edwardian architect. Shrouded in terracotta and columns, Sicilian Avenue was built to conjure up Sicily - with Ionic colonnades at each end creating a grand vision with a distinctive, classical Italian flavour. On top of the columns sits an entablature saying Sicilian Avenue.
Sicilian Avenue bears its Italian vibe with pride - created by visionary architect RJ Worley in 1910, and long a cherished landmark for Bloomsbury’s creative set, it has recently emerged sparkling from a multi-million-pound refurbishment. The ‘new’ Sicilian Avenue is already attracting coffee shops, with a very European approach to al fresco seating, and 70,000 sq ft of renovated contemporary offices sitting above 17,500 sq ft of retail and food and beverages.
Is Sicilian Avenue Pedestrianised?
The distinctive Italian flavour still remains, with the reimagined Sicilian Avenue (just six minutes walk from The British Museum, but feeling half a continent away), defiantly car-free and redolent of pedestrianised areas on the continent. It has been since its beginning more than a century ago. The revamped Sicilian Avenue is built for Italian-style outdoor living, with the new patterned granite paving, architectural lighting and the original listed Sicilian Avenue lamps, it conjures visions of a Sicily that perhaps existed only in the Edwardian mind - but is delightful nonetheless.
Where are Italian Streets in London?
London has many Italian flavours, of course, so if you’re exploring, it’s worth travelling up the Bakerloo line to Maida Vale, where the intersection of canals offers an elegant, secluded retreat that feels a thousand miles from central London - and was dubbed Little Venice by Victorian poet Robert Browning.
Or a little closer to Sicilian Avenue’s diagonal, the Covent Garden Piazza was designed by architect Inigo Jones to be a residential square, modeled on the piazza at Livorno in Northern Italy. Most of the buildings that stand there now are Victorian, but the piazza itself still has a distinctive flavour of Italy. No
The Roman Catholic basilica-style church on Clerkenwell Road (also, like Sicilian Avenue, in the borough of Camden), was built for the growing number of Italians in London in the mid-19th century (the area is known as Little Italy’, and was the first basilica-style church in the UK.
The Most Italian Place in London?
Is Sicilian Avenue the most Italian Place in London? Its take on Italy has been described as ‘Disney-esque’, and RJ Worley’s imagined ‘Italy’ was as much about ancient Rome as it was the Italy of a century ago - but when it comes to delivering a very unique, historical, British-Italian vibe in today’s London, the reborn diagonal street stands alone.