Covent Garden

Covent Garden is a place of London and a district of Westminster in the United Kingdom on which the markets were held. It is now known mainly for the Royal Opera House which was built in 1858 on the site of a theater itself built in 1732. This opera is often called same name as the place.

The sector is dominated by stores and places of entertainment and contains an entry for the Royal Opera House, which is known simply like “Covent Garden”.

The sector is surrounded by High Holborn, Kingsway, The Strand and Charing Cross Road. Covent Garden Piazza is located at the geographical center of the sector and was the site of a flower market, with the fruit and vegetables of the Années 1500 until 1974, date on which the wholesale market was moved with the New Covent Garden Market with Nine Elms.

History

Roman period up to 1800

A village existed in the sector since Roman times of Londinium.

“Garden General assembly of Freemasons” (garden of the convent), deformed later in “Covent Garden” as we know it today, was the name given, during the reign of the king Jean (1199 - 1256), with a place of 40 acres (160 000 m ²) in the county of Middlesex, framed in the west and in the east by what is now St Martin' S Lane and Drury Lane, in north and the south by Floral Street and a traced line Chandos Place, along Maiden Lane and of Exeter Street until Aldwych.

In this quadrilateral, the abbey or the convent of St Peter, Westminster, maintained a large kitchen garden throughout the Moyen-âge for autosuffire. During three centuries following, the old man “Covent Garden” of the monks became an important market of fruit and vegetables in London and was controlled by a succession of tenants with lease by concession of the abbot of Westminster.

This type of lease led thereafter to the conflicts of property in all the kingdom, that the king Henry VIII solved in 1540, when it dissolved the monasteries and adapted their grounds.

Henry VIII granted part of this place to the baron John Russell, Lord High admiral, and later count de Bedford. Achieving on his bed of died of wish of his father, the king Edouard VI granted the remainder of Covent Garden in 1547 to his maternal uncle, Edouard Seymour, 1st duke of Somerset, which began the Somerset House on the southern part of Strand the following year. When Seymour was decapitated for treason in 1552, this property returned again in the Crown of England and was allotted four months later to one of those which had contributed to the fall of Seymour. One granted forty acres (160 000 m ²), known under the name of “Covent Garden” or “the long acre”, by royal edict with perpetuity with the count de Bedford.

Modern Covent Garden has its roots in the 18th century, when the property (" Covent Garden") was rebuilt by Francis Russell, the 4th count de Bedford. The sector was designed by Inigo Jones, the largest first and of the English architects of the Rebirth. It was inspired by the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century and projected to build city-markets known under the name of country house S (themselves modelled on the Roman cities). The sector quickly became a base for the tradesmen of the market, and after the Grand fire of London of 1666 which destroyed the “rival” markets in the east of the city, the market became most important of the country. The exotic articles of everywhere in the world came by boats, were discharged on the quays from the the Thames and were sold in Covent Garden. The first mention of a spectacle of Punch and Judy in Great Britain was recorded by the journalist Samuel Pepys, who saw such a spectacle in the place in May 2052. Today Covent Garden is the only part of London where the spectacles of street are authorized. In 1830 a large recalling building of the Roman baths, like those found with Bath, was built to be the place of a permanent market.

Modern period at our days

Towards the end of the Années 1960, the congestion traffic in the accesses had reached such a level that the use of the place like market, which exigait the use of increasingly large trucks for the deliveries and the distribution, became insupportable. The whole sector was threatened by a complete rebuilding. After a public outcry, in 1973, the Home Secretary Robert Carr placed dozen buildings around the place on the list of the listed monuments, preventing the rebuilding. The following year, the market was finally moved on a new site (called the New Covent Garden Market) approximately five kilometers in south-west, with Nine Elms. The place languished until its central building is reopened like shopping mall and attraction for tourists in 1980. The Museum of the transport of London and the back entry of the Royal Opera House are also localized on Piazza.

In a somewhat different musical tradition, in Neal Street, punk club, Roxy in 1977 celebrates it.

Since 2005, in Covent Garden the “Avenue is off Stars”, the response of London to the walk of Hollywood, who passes in front of St Paul' S Church, also known like the “church of the actors”.

Anecdotes

the market and the theater mémorablement were mémorablement gathered in the opening of the part of George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion , where professor Higgins awaits a taxi to bring back it opera to his house when it finds by chance Eliza Doolittle selling of the flowers on the market.

In the Years 1950, before it directed films as As yew and O Lucky Man , Lindsay Anderson directed a short film having for subject the daily activities of the market of Covent Garden, called Every Day Except Christmas . It shows 12 hours of the life of the market and the people of the market.

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