Above a barber's shop at number 21, on a damp April day in 1775, the painter who would change British art forever drew his first breath. Joseph Mallord William Turner - the boy who would become the man who painted The Fighting Temeraire, Rain, Steam and Speed, and the storm-soaked seas no one had managed to put on canvas before - was born here on Maiden Lane in Covent Garden. His father William was the local barber and wigmaker; his mother Mary Marshall came from a family of fishmongers. The street was already old when Turner was born, already crowded with theatre folk and Italian musicians, and it had been quietly collecting odd guests for a century. Voltaire had slept here. The Communist Party of Great Britain would set up shop here. And in 1898 the first recording studio in Europe would open a few doors down.
The street was laid out on top of something older - an ancient track that ran through what was then the Convent Garden, the vegetable garden of Westminster Abbey, on its way to St Martin's Lane. According to the antiquary Isaac D'Israeli (father of the future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli), the name came from a statue of the Virgin Mary that once stood somewhere along the lane. The building leases on either side were granted in pulses between 1631 and 1728, the area filling in as London expanded westward. By Turner's day the lane was a narrow, busy thoroughfare between Bedford Street and Southampton Street, lined with shopfronts, taverns, lodgings and the back doors of the theatres and oyster bars that defined Covent Garden.
In 1727, the French satirist Francois-Marie Arouet - already calling himself Voltaire - landed in London after being beaten up in Paris by the lackeys of a nobleman he had mocked and then briefly imprisoned in the Bastille. He spent more than two years in England. In Maiden Lane he took a room at the White Wig Inn, a tavern catering to French visitors and the wig-and-barber trade clustered nearby. The English exile changed him. He learned the language well enough to write in it, picked up Newtonian physics, watched Shakespeare on stage, and absorbed a tolerant constitutional politics that he would smuggle home in the Lettres Philosophiques. The book got him exiled from Paris a second time. A French philosopher's English idea of liberty was hatched, in part, in a Covent Garden inn that no longer stands.
William Turner senior cut hair and made wigs in the ground-floor shop. Above the shop lived his wife, his son the future painter, and his daughter Helen, who died at five. Mary Turner suffered from severe mental illness and was eventually committed to Bethlem Hospital; she died in 1804. The father, by contrast, devoted himself to his son's career, eventually closing the barber shop to act as Turner's studio assistant, framer and dealer. The young Turner's earliest known works were watercolours he hung in the shop window for passers-by to buy. He was admitted to the Royal Academy schools at fourteen, elected an Associate at twenty-four, and a full Academician at twenty-seven - then the youngest in the institution's history. The light that fills his canvases came partly from voyages along the Thames and the south coast; it came also, biographers have argued, from the narrow yellow-grey daylight that filtered down into Maiden Lane between buildings barely wide enough apart to let the sun through.
In 1898, Frederick Gaisberg and the Gramophone Company opened the first recording studio in Europe at 31 Maiden Lane. Their equipment cut wax masters from singers performing into a horn; the masters were then electroplated and used to stamp shellac discs. Caruso would record for the company a few years later, in Milan. But here on Maiden Lane, opera singers, music hall performers and brass bands first sang or played into the technology that would carry their voices into the gramophone parlours of Edwardian England. A few doors away, just before the First World War, the British Socialist Party set up its offices at 21A; when the Communist Party of Great Britain was founded in 1920, it took over the same premises in its first year, putting Marx's pamphlets through the door above Turner's birthplace.
At number 34 stands Rules, founded in 1798 by Thomas Rule and now the oldest restaurant in London - oysters, game pies, and a private room upstairs where Edward VII used to bring Lillie Langtry through a discreet side door. Corpus Christi Roman Catholic Church, hidden between buildings on the south side, has stood here since 1873 and is associated with English Catholic musicians: it housed the choir school of St Cecilia's Society. Today the lane is pedestrianised in part, lined with the same Georgian and Victorian fronts but converted into theatres' stage doors, small offices and the back entrances of the bigger restaurants. It looks like an alley. It has produced more famous Londoners by the metre than streets ten times its length.
Maiden Lane lies at 51.5107° N, 0.1229° W in the heart of Covent Garden, running east-west between Bedford Street and Southampton Street. From the air, it sits just south of the open piazza of Covent Garden Market and a block north of the Strand. The Lyceum Theatre is two minutes' walk east, the Vaudeville and Adelphi a similar distance south. London City (EGLC) is the nearest major airport; London Heliport (EGLW) handles helicopter traffic. Central London is Class A airspace. On the ground, look for the small blue plaque marking Turner's birthplace at 21 Maiden Lane and Rules's distinctive bay-windowed Victorian frontage at number 34.