Covent Garden’s transformation from a workaday fruit and vegetable market into a fashion—conscious quartier is one of the most miraculous and enduring developments of the 1980s. More sanitized and brazenly commercial than neighbouring Soho, it’s a far cry from the district’s heyday when the piazza was the great playground (and red-light district) of eighteenth-century London. The buskers in front of St Paul’s Church, the theatres round about, and the Royal Opera House on Bow Street are survivors in this tradition, and on a warm summer evening, Covent Garden s still an undeniably lively place to be. Another positive side effect of the market development has been the renovation of the run-down warehouses north of the piazza, especially around the Neal Street area, which now house some of the most fashionable shops in the West End, selling everything from shoes to skateboards.
The Strand
As its name suggests, the Strand, just to the south of Covent Garden, once the riverbank; it achieved its present—day form when the Victorians shored up the banks of the river Thames to create the Embankment. One show piece, Somerset House, remains, its courtyard graced by a fifty five jet fountain its chambers home to several museums and galleries, including Courtauld’s superb collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings.
Covent Garden ( www.coventgardenlife.com ) has come full circle: what in the seventeenth century as London’s first luxury neighbourhood a highly desirable place to live, work and shop. Based around Inigo Jones' Plaza London’s oldest planned square the area had for years been a market for fruit, flowers and vegetables. When the flower market closed the piazza narrowly survived being turned into an office development. Instead, public protests ensured that the elegant Victorian market hall and its environs were restored to house shops, restaurants and art-and-craft stalls. Boosted by buskers and street entertainers, Covent Garden has since become one of London’s major tourist attractions; the area’s success has prompted a wholesale gentrification of the streets to the north, particularly on Long Acre, Neal Street and Floral Street, which now boast some of London’s trendiest clothes shops, cafés and restaurants. Alongside them, a few tiny pockets of 1970s “alternative” culture survive, left over from the days of squats and cheap rentals, when the whole area was threatened with destruction. London’s tourism revenues owe them a considerable debt - it was only their demonstrations, and mass protests, that saved the area.
Most visitors are happy enough simply to wander around watching the street life, having a coffee and doing a bit of shopping, but there are one or two specific sights worth picking out. One of the old market buildings is now occupied by the Theatre Museum and London’s Transport Museum, both highly recommended, and the old Floral Hall has been transformed into the new and very public foyer for the internationally famous Royal Opera House, which boasts a great roof terrace overlooking the piazza.
The Covent Garden Piazza
Covent Garden’s piazza was laid out in the 1630s, when the Earl of Bedford commissioned Inigo Jones to design a series of graceful Palladian-style arcades based on the main square in Livorno, Tuscany, where Jones had helped build the cathedral. Initially the development was a great success, its novelty value alone attracting a rich and aristocratic clientele, but over the next century the tone of the place fell as the fruit, vegetable and flower market, set up in the Earl’s back garden, expanded, and theatres, coffee houses and unfortunately brothels began to take over the peripheral buildings. The historian Macaulay evoked the following scene: “fruit women screamed, carters fought, cabbage stalks and rotten apples accumulated in heaps at the thresholds of the Countess of Berkshire and the Bishop of Durham”,
The piazza’s status as a centre of entertainment declined with the approach of the nineteenth century. The theatres still drew crowds but the market now occupied most of the area, and the few remaining taverns had become a little dangerous for the casual visitor . However, in the 1830s the piazza was cleaned up, the slums were torn down and a proper market hall built in the Greek Revival style. A glass roof was added in the late Victorian era, but otherwise the building stayed unaltered until the closure of the market in 1974 when the trade moved south of the river Thames to Nine Elms in Vauxhall and its early-1980s renovation as a shopping arcade.
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