Leonard Bentley
Piccadilly Circus: 1970
This is a J. Arthur Dixon postcard printed in Great Britain showing Piccadilly Circus looking northeast with Coventry Street on the right and Shaftesbury Avenue on the left. It is mid July 1970 and all the people that can be seen in the photograph are carrying denominations of pounds, shillings and pence, decimalisation came the following year. The John Boorman film, “Leo the Last” is playing at the London Pavilion, it starred Marcello Mastroianni and Billie Whitelaw in the official British entry to the 1970 Cannes Film Festival for which John Boorman won best director. Mastroianni described his role “as a man who finds no difficulty loving humanity in general at a distance but is stricken with impotence whenever he tries to make any closer approach”. Funnily enough this film has never made it to DVD. On the Shaftesbury Avenue side of the London Pavilion is an advertisement for “Mon Chéri” chocolates made by the Italian company, Ferrero. The chocolates are individually wrapped and contain a cherry in liqueur encased with dark chocolate, they were introduced onto the Italian market 1956 and then the British and French markets in 1960, they are still being made and are very popular in the UK. The advertisement for “Wrigley’s chewing gum” had occupied that site since the late 1930s, but the gum had first been imported from the USA in 1911 when it was sold from Heppell’s chemist in Piccadilly. “Wrigley’s Chewing gum” was made in the UK at a factory in Wembley from 1927 and later moved to a site in Plymouth in the early 1970s where it is still made, the company is now owned by the Mars Group.
Piccadilly Circus: 1970
This is a J. Arthur Dixon postcard printed in Great Britain showing Piccadilly Circus looking northeast with Coventry Street on the right and Shaftesbury Avenue on the left. It is mid July 1970 and all the people that can be seen in the photograph are carrying denominations of pounds, shillings and pence, decimalisation came the following year. The John Boorman film, “Leo the Last” is playing at the London Pavilion, it starred Marcello Mastroianni and Billie Whitelaw in the official British entry to the 1970 Cannes Film Festival for which John Boorman won best director. Mastroianni described his role “as a man who finds no difficulty loving humanity in general at a distance but is stricken with impotence whenever he tries to make any closer approach”. Funnily enough this film has never made it to DVD. On the Shaftesbury Avenue side of the London Pavilion is an advertisement for “Mon Chéri” chocolates made by the Italian company, Ferrero. The chocolates are individually wrapped and contain a cherry in liqueur encased with dark chocolate, they were introduced onto the Italian market 1956 and then the British and French markets in 1960, they are still being made and are very popular in the UK. The advertisement for “Wrigley’s chewing gum” had occupied that site since the late 1930s, but the gum had first been imported from the USA in 1911 when it was sold from Heppell’s chemist in Piccadilly. “Wrigley’s Chewing gum” was made in the UK at a factory in Wembley from 1927 and later moved to a site in Plymouth in the early 1970s where it is still made, the company is now owned by the Mars Group.