It’s half a century since Covent Garden’s eponymous market travelled south of the River Thames, but it did little to dent the area’s appeal. Jack Watkins charts the history of Covent Garden from Tudor times to the present day. The autumn of 2024 marks the date, 50 years ago, that Covent Gardens’s fruit, flower and vegetable market moved to Vauxhall, leaving the central piazza unused and the future of the entire quarter uncertain.
There had been debates about the market, which had long outgrown its location, for decades. In 1968, a council plan held the prospect of mass demolitions to make room for a conference centre, hotels, elevated pedestrian walkways and, in an age when the car was top priority, a sunken four-lane carriageway. The angry reaction of locals galvanised a lengthy campaign demanding, and eventually achieving, recognition of the integrity of the area and of the needs of people who lived there.
As a result, Covent Garden became an early example of conservation-led regeneration based on restoring existing buildings. Today, although the area has seen familiar high-street brands push out many small independent shops, the sense of human scale remains, with an absence of disorientating large office blocks or flats. The cramped, busy market with its vegetable boxes piled unceremoniously beside the portico of St Paul’s Church, so atmospherically caught in Lindsay Anderson’s documentary Every Day Except Christmas (1957) and Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate t.
