London’s Alleys: Cucumber Alley, WC2

This is a covered alley in Seven Dials near Covent Garden that looks old and is on an old alignment but is actually entirely modern.

An alley that aligns loosely with Cucumber Alley first appears on the William Morgan map of 1682 and is called Mairmaid Alley.

However, the whole area was completely rebuilt by the developer Thomas Neil in the 1690s to form the street pattern we have today, centred on Seven Dials. Originally built as housing, this is also when Cucumber Alley came into existence.

However, it shows up as Neals Passage in R Horwood’s map of 1799, as an extension of Neal’s Yard, but at some point after that, the alley vanished entirely. That was likely to do with the slow change of the area from mostly residential into the warehouses that still dominate the appearance of the streets. A lot of these were created to support the expanding Covent Garden market, which was for a while London’s main wholesale market for fruit and vegetables.

The Goad Insurance maps show a large yard where part of the alley was, but the southern half has been built over and replaced with an ice house, probably providing ice to help preserve the fruits.

The “alley” was still a warehouse in the 1960s, and if you zoom in on the door next to the Donmar theatre entrance in this photo – the warehouse door is the Earlham Street entrance to Cucumber Alley. The yard also still existed, and in 1968, was being used as the Donmar Theatre’s warehouse storage yard.

The old warehouse building was redeveloped in 1992 to form a retail shopping centre known as Thomas Neal’s. At the time, it mainly served clothing retailers. That’s when Cucumber Alley reappeared — as a covered passage through the warehouse building. So, while the alley looks like a Victorian-covered passage created for the warehouses, it’s actually a 1990s replica.

Replica Victoriana was terrifically popular with property conversions at the time, and it was the developer who reintroduced the long-lost Cucumber Alley as its name.

Until recently, Cucumber Alley was a fairly bland covered shopping arcade with conventional shop fronts and looking terrifically millennial in style, a legacy of “improvements” carried out by the landlord Shaftesbury PLC, who bought the site in 1999. Amazingly, it was an improvement on the 1980s refurbishment, which had a fake arts-and-crafts appearance.

A couple of years ago, in April 2022, the alley was “revitalised”, stripping out the shops and steel frontages and replacing them with rows of takeaway food outlets, with a press announcement that was more excited about how instagramable the food is than how tasty it is.

It’s now more of a food alley, with seating in the triangle to one side, and trades much more of its vegetable namesake, with a cluster of giant cucumbers in one corner to make sure you know where you are.

The whole thing is now managed by street food membership operator KERB.