Piccadilly Circus owes its curious name to Robert Baker, a tailor who made his fortune in the early 1600s selling "piccadills," those fancy collars that were all the rage among London's fashionable set. The "circus" part simply refers to the circular junction, laid out in 1819 to connect the newly built Regent Street with Piccadilly.

At its heart stands the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, topped with what everyone calls Eros but is actually Anteros, the Greek god of requited love. Erected in 1893 to honour Lord Shaftesbury, a Victorian social reformer, the statue has presided over countless rendezvous, including some rather sinister ones. Former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko made this his regular meeting spot, always walking rather than standing still, practising his counter-surveillance drills before his fatal encounter with polonium in 2006.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours reveal how this neon-lit crossroads connects London's many worlds: tracing Harry Potter's near miss with a double-decker bus here in the Deathly Hallows, following the radioactive trail of international espionage, and uncovering why this junction became the natural gathering point before heading to Regent Street's shops or Shaftesbury Avenue's theatres.