Today Covent Garden is one of the better places to go if you have time to kill in Central London. It’s a mecca for both shoppers and street performers, and the two groups seem to enjoy each other’s company. Covent Garden is in the West End, but it has less traffic than Piccadilly Circus and is more interesting than Leicester Square.
ITALIAN STYLE But that hasn’t always been the case . Tour guide Joanna Moncrieff (see interview), who runs a company called Westminster Walks, says that Covent Garden has had many identities over the centuries. Like much of London, it was once in open country . It was the site of a monastery and here the monks grew vegetables in the “Convent Garden.” But then came Henry VIII, the man with six wives. Not only did he turn England into a Protestant country, he also “dissolved” the monasteries. He took the best land for himself, but his son gave Co(n)vent Garden to John Russell, Earl of Bedford. A descendant commissioned the architect Inigo Jones to build an Italian-style piazza in the 17th century. Jones also built a famous church in the piazza: St. Paul’s (not to be confused with the Cathedral). This is known as the Actors’ Church and to this day memorial services for famous actors are held there.
the rich and famous Joanna Moncrieff says that the plan under Inigo Jones was to make Covent Garden a place for the rich but, as so often happens, the plan went wrong. Instead the rich moved further west, to places like Mayfair, and Covent Garden became a seedy area full of coffee houses and prostitutes.
my fair lady Covent Garden’s other claims to fame include the Royal Opera House, which is still going strong. It was built in the 19th century, on the site of an older building. The famous fruit and vegetable market was also built at that time. Then, as now, different worlds would meet in Covent Garden. George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion , which later became a Broadway musical and movie (with Audrey Hepburn), My Fair Lady , begins with a phonetics professor meeting a Cockney flower girl in Covent Garden. As Joanna Moncrieff explains, the old building was nearly destroyed when the market was moved to the Nine Elms district (south of the river) in 1974, but, like My Fair Lady , Covent Garden appears to have had a happy ending.
(Play the audio) INTERVIEW: hitchcock the hero If you go to London, Covent Garden is a great place to hang out and watch the world go by. People love this Italian-style piazza and its street performers, as well as the bars, shops and restaurants in the old fruit and vegetable market. But, as tour guide Joanna Moncrieff explains, Covent Garden nearly got destroyed when the fruit market was moved to another part of London in the 1970s:
Joanna Moncrieff (Standard British/London accent): It has had so many different identities over the years and, you know, it’s a thriving place today and we’re so lucky that we’ve still got it and we didn’t lose it in the 1970s. And the original plan was to knock most of it down; a whole load of streets would have gone, four theatres would have been demolished, they were going to build a conference centre, hotels, shops, they would have just wiped it out . And protests were slow to arrive at first because, you know, people didn’t know about this plan, but once people started realizing that they were getting priced out of the area, they were going to lose their homes, lose their theatres, lose their shops, and people campaigned and it was saved. And you can’t imagine it today, if that had all gone. It wasn’t just the buildings, the whole community would have been wiped out.
frenzy And one person who helped saved the market was the film director Alfred Hitchcock:
Joanna Moncrieff: Alfred Hitchcock, his father was a greengrocer and he knew the market was under threat – this is in the early ‘70s – so when he filmed Frenzy , he included a scene, or various scenes, actually in the market, and there is one scene where the actor Barry Foster, who’s playing the murderer , murders this woman in a house in Henrietta Street, and then bundles her into a potato bag, into a cart , and you can see it on YouTube – it’s horrible, actually! – but just find that one clip on YouTube and you can see what the market was like in the 1970s. It was still thriving, but it was in the last few years.
sTREET LIFE Hitchcock died in 1976 and so he didn’t live to see the new Covent Garden. He would probably have been happy with it. Joanna Moncrieff certainly is:
Joanna Moncrieff: Yeah, I’m very happy with it. It’s a nice place to wander , I mean, sometimes it is a bit too busy on a Saturday, but that’s the same with a lot of places in London. You know, there are some nice shops, and they have good art installations there and lots of stuff going on, there’s someone normally singing opera in the sort of basement area that sort of wafts through the air . Yeah, there’s always something going on there. I mean, this week, I was walking through and discovered that all the Shaun the Sheep were there! They were all in this area before being auctioned . I think they’ve gone now, but you just stumble across these things in London. Why are every single Shaun the Sheep in this street? Yeah!
For more information about Westminster Walks visit: http://westminsterwalks.london