Carnaby Street is a street in London, England (near Oxford Circus) that acquired a reputation in the 1960s for being an area full of hip shops (mostly independent clothing stores and a place to get music). It was typically a hangout for followers of the Mod style, but soon became too commercial for their liking and was abandoned by them. The name was specifically associated with fashion, and linked with designers such as Mary Quant.

Now it is just another London street, full of cheesy shops selling clothes and tourist tat, although the streets around that make up the rest of the Carnaby Estate (which itself makes up a good part of Soho and runs from Kingly Street in the west to Poland Street in the east, and bordered by Great Marlborough and Beak streets) have some great boutique clothing shops, bars and restaurants.

The only two pubs actually on Carnaby Street are the Firkin and the Shakespeares Head, both near the Great Marlborough Street end at the north, next to the department store Liberty's . Also in the area include are the Masala Zone curry house on Marshall Street, the White Horse pub on Newburgh Street (a good place for a drink after work in the summer), as well as Zebranos and Bar Monaco on Ganton Street and the many bars of Beak Street. From 1999 until its bankruptcy in May 2000 Carnaby Street was also the address of boo.com.

Nearby places of interest include Broadwick Street, where you can still see the water pump that John Snow famously sealed up to stop an outbreak of Cholera in 1854, Hamleys and the rest of Regent Street, and Golden Square just to the south, which during the summer is crammed with office workers trying to catch the sun. Only a few hundred years earlier Golden Square was crammed with a different kind of body - it was used as a burial pit during the Black Death.

If you're on Carnaby Street and out of cash, the nearest ATM machines are across the other side of Regent Street, on Conduit Street.

See Also

• Haight-Ashbury