St Giles Passage

St Giles Passage is a short footway on the eastern edge of Soho, near St Giles-in-the-Fields and Shaftesbury Avenue. It takes its name from the parish church and the much older St Giles Hospital, a leper hospital founded in 1117 by Matilda of Scotland, wife of Henry I.

The wider St Giles district was for centuries one of London's poorest, a warren of courts known as the rookery that was largely cleared in the 19th and 20th centuries. The passage is a surviving fragment of that older street pattern, now a quiet pedestrian link between the church grounds and the streets around it.