As you come out of Leicester Square towards Charing Cross Road and the Leicester Square tube station, you can cross over at the traffic lights and continue down Cranbourn Street. It’s a pretty innocuous street – very unmemorable. But two hundred years ago, it was the known as Cranbourne Alley and regarded as the “great bonnet mart of London”. If you were a lady, you’d go and buy your fashionable bonnet to adorn your head in Cranbourne Alley.

Bad bonnets not allowed in Cranbourn Alley!

But god forbid, if the bonnet you were wearing as you walked down the street was unfashionable. Because you would be badgered by the She Barkers, women employed to harass ladies whose bonnets desperately needed replacing. If you think shop assistants can sometimes be pushy now, that’s nothing compared to the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. As a book I have from the 1830s explains:

Woe used to betide the woman of the middle classes who passed through Cranbourne Alley with an unfashionable bonnet! It was immediately seen from one end of the place to the other and twenty barkers beset her, each in turn, as she walked forward, arresting her course by invitations to inspect the ware that was for sale within. Many a one has had her cloak or shawl torn from her back by these rival sisters of trade during their struggles to draw her within their den, each pulling a different way.