Goodwin's Court

Most people walk past the entrance to Goodwin's Court without noticing it. It's a narrow gap off St Martin's Lane, between Leicester Square and Covent Garden — two of the busiest spots in London. Step through, and you're suddenly in sixteen ninety.

The houses on the south side were built in that year, making them over three hundred and thirty years old. They feature late eighteenth-century bow-fronted shopfronts with original leaded glass windows — the kind with bullseye panes, where the glass has that distinctive circular ripple from the way it was hand-spun. Those ten-inch-deep bow windows weren't an aesthetic choice. They were built to comply with the Building Act of seventeen seventy-four, which was designed to stop fire spreading between buildings after the trauma of the Great Fire.

The alley has a persistent reputation as the inspiration for Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books. It's not hard to see why — the narrow passage, the old-fashioned shopfronts, the gas-lamp-style lighting. Multiple Harry Potter fan sites and tour guides claim it as the original. But J.K. Rowling has never confirmed this, and Leadenhall Market and Cecil Court make the same claim. It might be all of them. It might be none.

Nell Gwynn — Charles the Second's most famous mistress — is alleged to have lived here, though there's no solid evidence for it. What is solid is the architecture. These are among the best-preserved late seventeenth-century domestic fronts in London, sitting in plain sight on one of the most-walked streets in the West End, noticed by almost nobody. Sometimes the best hiding places are right in the middle of everything.