Esoteric London

Langham Road, London, N15. Photo ©RogerDean 2014

Dickens’s Dictionary Of London, An Unconventional Handbook – Charles Dickens, 1882:

Criterion Theatre, Regent-cir, Piccadilly.– Is built entirely underground. It is really part of the Criterion Restaurant, with which it was intended to form one establishment. The rules of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, however, forbid any communication between two places of the kind, and the doors leading from one to the other have accordingly been stopped up. The entrance halls, however, adjoin, so that it is still possible to get from one to the other without actually going out into the rain.