Charing Cross

Empire has everything to do with naming. Names like Boston, Salem, New York, Nova Scotia, and countless others are not without meaning; they are the transposition of British places onto territories that were imagined deserving of colonial transformation. Charing Cross, wherein the thirteenth century a memorial cross was erected for a dead queen (Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I), was one such place. In his maps of the far north of what is now Canada, sixteenth-century explorer Martin Frobisher named one headland Charing Cross, creating yet another entanglement between London and the broader world. The area around Charing Cross, meanwhile, was known in the early seventeenth century as the Bermudas, in part because of the prevalence of tobacco houses here—another exchange of places between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ worlds.