This reopened street reveals a British passion for history.
Architect R. J. Worley was no Sicilian, but he was determined to deliver, in a little corner between Bloomsbury and Holborn, an air of Mediterranean romance. The result, completed in 1910, was Sicilian Avenue, a pedestrianised avenue that would become one of London's most charming architectural oddities. The Avenue was dressed in Italian marble and white terracotta; the classical flourishes, most notably the Ionic columns at either end, and the scrollwork seen throughout, were clearly intended to recall antiquity.
While there’s no surviving record of Worley’s inspiration for his creation, the existence of Sicilian Avenue is likely a descendant of Britain’s Grand Tour tradition. Lasting from the 17th to the 19th century, this was a period in which young men of wealthy European families would take a cultural trip around the continent, typically ending up in Italy. The motivation was to broaden their horizons, and to be inspired by the abundant art, architecture and sunshine of which they felt starved at home. Some of the great English poets, such as Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, regarded themselves as such “Grand Tourists”.
Sicily, lying at the very toe of Italy’s “boot”, was the subject of much fascination among British travellers and antiquarians from as early as the 16th century. It became the setting for Ann Radcliffe’s 18th century gothic novel A Sicilian Romance, which masterfully evoked the majesty and mystery of the island, and painters such as William Turner tried to capture its ethereal atmosphere. That fascination endured well into the 20th century, to the extent that, as historians such as Robert Holland have shown, it effectively helped shape the British artistic imagination. As Holland writes, Mediterranean settings gave British society “the chance to enrich itself through an imagined world of colour, carnival, and sensual self-discovery”.
Thanks to the Grand Tour, Italy went on to inspire the early 19th century British Italianate architectural style practiced by such legends as John Nash, best known for the development of London’s Regent’s Street and Regent’s Park. It is not known whether Robert Worley, working a century later, spent much time in Sicily, but he was clearly inspired by the Grand Tour tradition and this Italianate trend.
And so today, Sicilian Avenue winds a curious path back through centuries of history, interpretation and reinterpretation, to create a little patch of Mediterranean sunlight in a most unexpected corner of Bloomsbury. Whilst being thoroughly British, it manages to capture the romance and warmth that its namesake island inspired in generations of dreamers.