Dansey Place

Dansey Place is a narrow alley running parallel to Gerrard Street in the part of Soho that became London's Chinatown. It lies within the cluster of streets and courts, alongside Gerrard, Lisle, Macclesfield and Newport, where Chinese restaurants, shops and businesses settled from the 1960s onwards to form the present Chinatown after an earlier community at Limehouse declined.

The alley dates from speculative building of the 1670s and 1680s on open ground known as the Military Grounds. By the eighteenth century it had been named George Yard, after the George and Dragon inn it served. When that inn was demolished in the late nineteenth century to allow the cutting of Shaftesbury Avenue, the yard was renamed Dansey Place, and its line has changed little since.

The alley carries its share of Soho lore. A nineteenth-century public urinal stood in the middle of it, known as Clarkson's Cottage, and in the 1930s the place was used for unlicensed 'bottle party' clubs. Today its low buildings hold kitchen entrances and back doors serving the Chinatown trade, a working service route just off Wardour Street.