Lisle Street

Lisle Street runs parallel to Gerrard Street, one block north, and forms part of London's Chinatown. It was laid out on the Leicester estate in the late seventeenth century, its earliest houses built around the same time as those in Leicester Street under leases from the 1680s. The street takes its name from a title held by the Sidney family of Leicester House.

The Chinese community moved into this part of Soho after the Second World War, drawn by low rents and by an earlier Chinatown in Limehouse that had been damaged by wartime bombing. Some of the first Chinese restaurants in the area opened in Lisle Street, among them the Kowloon, and the street settled into the mix of restaurants, import companies and food shops that runs through Chinatown today. The See Woo supermarket here is said to have imported the first pak choi into Britain.

In the mid-1980s Westminster City Council worked with the Chinese community on improvements to the area, including the restoration of Lisle Street's eighteenth-century shop fronts. The street remains busy with diners and shoppers, and connects the entertainment of Leicester Square with the older Soho streets towards Wardour Street.