Tavistock Square Gardens

Tavistock Square Gardens sits on land once known as the Field of the Forty Footsteps. According to local legend, this area was the site of a fatal seventeenth-century duel between two brothers fighting over a woman. The story claims the brothers killed each other in such a vengeful struggle that their footprints remained permanently etched into the earth, preventing grass or vegetation from ever growing over the path they trod. While nineteenth-century writers searched in vain for these marks, the legend persisted, shaping the eerie reputation of what was then a remote and lawless edge of the city.