Original subtitles

Right. Could you turn the lights out?

A lot of the housing in this area is

named after people in the theatre trade.

The street is Stukeley Street,

which is really historical.

He was an amazing man.

He helped set up the British Museum.

This spot used to be a nurses' home.

Historically, it's a fascinating site. It's called Dudley House.

It used to be the workhouse for Central London.

When you go down Drury Lane, you can sing Muffin Man.

Here comes the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man.

Here comes the muffin man, who lives in Drury Lane.

That used to be arts club.

Wonderful events took place there.

So we've got Macklin Street, Betterton Street,

more theatre names.

This was the old Covent Garden Sainsbury's.

This is where Sainsbury's first shop was.

The print trade started about here,

and that building down the bottom is the Odhams Press.

These buildings used to be stables

for horses that used to take the paper.

Drury Lane shooting down,

as I say, the main north to south route.

Just get a glimpse of Bruce House, one of the lodging houses.

George Orwell talked about them. Before it, you've got Wild Street,

which is quite apposite because it's pretty wild sometimes.

The building on our left, by the way, is, um,

Fieldings. It's the magistrates' court, Bow Street, now a hotel.

But it's famous for many, many cases.

Press was always around here.

This, on the right, used to be the opera house

costume rooms.

A lot of people there helped us with our banners and made things.

This is a higgledy-piggledy medieval street pattern

developed very arbitrarily.

And suddenly, we're now looking

across into the main entrance

hitting the square, but actually it's a piazza.

Thank you.

So here we are.

Boy, oh, boy, in Covent Garden Piazza.

In the main square of Covent Garden

and in the main square of London.

Just one vast space.

Very impressive.

This is a film about the city

told through the story of one iconic London space,

the Covent Garden Piazza.

Each year, around 43 million people

visit Covent Garden. They come for the shops

and the theatres, for the street performers

and the restaurants.

But they also come because Covent Garden

today is what it has been at various moments

in its history.

It's a place to come and feel part of London,

even if you're only visiting.

Because for almost 400 years,

this has been a unique space.

This piazza is like the frame of a painting,

and inside it, generation after generation

have lived out their lives.

On these worn cobbles,

we follow in the footsteps of fascinating characters.

Celebrities and criminals.

Artists and pioneers.

The filthy rich and the starving poor.

All of these life stories are contained in the past

of this one space.

Although the piazza has changed a lot over the centuries,

it still measures 316ft wide

by 420 long, as it always has done.

And everything that has ever happened here

has happened in this exact same space.

If these stones could talk, what tales they would tell.

There's a meaning here.

It doesn't bear any comparison to when I was a young boy

and it was all buzzing and going on.

My name is Lou Myers,

and I was born in 1927.

When I was about ten, I suppose,

I had a friend whose family,

the Baldwins, were established traders.

I came down here on a Friday night with my pal

and as a kid I got a little

casual job on a Friday night, stacking boxes.

It was very lucrative in those days. Ten shillings when I was a,

when I was a small boy, was a lot of money.

And, basically, that's how I got involved

or became part of

Covent Garden Market.

For much of the 20th century,

Covent Garden is Britain's largest wholesale market,

specialising in fruit, vegetables

and flowers.

It's a working class community,

living right in the centre of London and busy round the clock.

Until...

..one night in the early '70s,

the shutters come down for good

and the piazza is earmarked for demolition and redevelopment.

I was completely amazed that something like this

was being promoted in a complete philistine attitude of demolishing

as much as they were.

Introduce myself, Jim Monahan. I'm an architect.

Um, getting a bit ancient in light.

I got to know Covent Garden when I was about 17-18.

I was living around here off and on, sometimes squatting,

cos there was a lot of empty property.

The planners came along and explained their scheme.

And it was extraordinary.

I came over with huge anger, actually.

Real anger and determination that we ought to do something.

You're fighting the biggest boys in town.

You're fighting a whole political system, you're fighting

most of all money.

No-one talks about the sort of strengths of Covent Garden.

The major strength lies with the people who live and work here.

The greatest asset one has is personality.

And one has them here.

The fight against the developers is the final

climactic battle fought by the community

that emerged around the piazza.

But the history of that community

and this space is one that begins

in the early 1600s,

just after the age of Shakespeare and the Tudors.

As it emerges from the medieval age,

London expands towards a large private garden

that once belonged to a nearby convent.

It's now seen as a prime development opportunity

by its new owner, Francis Russell the Earl of Bedford.

Francis Russell, the 4th Earl of Bedford,

was a pioneer in terms of being a land owner

and an aristocrat.

He was a man who was looking to turn his property

into profit.

During this period, you can see the seeds of capitalism

emerging out of London.

This is the early days of empire.

Also the idea of land or private property being a thing

that you can speculate on.

And with the design of Covent Garden, he came up with an idea

that was totally foreign to anything that had been done

in London before.

Russell decided that he would create one single project.

One single piazza.

And there was this very strict form of the central piazza,

this open space.

This is very much the very first square that London had seen.

An ordered, geometric, stone metropolis.

On the southern edge of the empty piazza

a high wall protects the rest of the Earl of Bedford's estate.

All along the eastern and northern sides

is an impressive colonnade four storeys high.

At the centre of the western end is a church,

the only building from the original piazza that survives.

So it's a landmark from which we can find our way back

to this lost world.

This is the piazza soon after it was completed.

So this is the late 1630s.

And what it represents is a revolution

in British urban living.

Ah, it's so beautiful, isn't it?

Gosh, the sort of sense of space

is extraordinary.

Just, sort of, feel what it would be like to

walk across the piazza.

Sort of, almost, sort of,

hear the sounds, hear the city.

Despite the fact that this building looks completely uniform,

it's actually divided up into individual houses.

So there's also a, sort of, sense in the design

of the city needs to be a place of order.

There is a very early description of this elegant space.

A sermon preached in its own church so impresses

the piazza's creator, that Francis Russell notes it down

for posterity.

London, the ring,

Covent Garden, the jewel of that ring.

London's population is growing rapidly

in the 1630s, but at a cost.

Each year, the dirt and the disease

and the overcrowded unsanitary conditions claim the lives

of thousands.

And these uniform porticoed houses

with piped water, looking out into the open space of a piazza,

they are the new modern solution.

And compared to much of the rest of the city,

this place, this is a sanctuary.

My whole family has got a lot to be thankful for Covent Garden.

That there is my grandfather.

Um, and he was the main man who we sort of followed into the market.

That's a good picture of him there. That's how I remember him mostly.

He was born

in 1897.

He was a very fair, kind, considerate man.

But could throw a right-hander.

So he spent a few times out on the stones,

which was the cobble stones in Covent Garden Market,

down by St Paul's Church.

If there was a disagreement, they'd go out onto the stones,

take their shirts off and, um,

the last man standing was the winner and they'd shake hands

afterwards and have a beer. But he was undefeated in all his time

in Covent Garden. No-one ever took him away.

He was undefeated.

So this is his son,

Jim.

Jimmy Mole.

Um, that's my dad,

Teddy Mole.

All worked in Covent Garden Market.

The same as I did. The whole family was connected through,

for me, was connected through Covent Garden Market.

If I ever wanted to find any family or anything like that,

there's only one place I would go,

and it would be Covent Garden Market, cos that's where my family

were and that's part of me. That was part of what Covent Garden Market was.

It was a place of work, it was a place of being connected,

of knowing people, advice, friendship.

It meant so much to me, personally,

the buildings, the streets,

everything about it was all part of my life,

what was internally me.

Although the Covent Garden Market of recent history

has a tight-knit working class population,

this space begins in the 1600s as a sanctuary

for those at the upper end of the social scale.

So, at number 43 King Street is living William Paget,

who was Baron Paget.

At number 2, The Great Piazza,

is Sir John Harper. At number 3

is John Mordaunt, who is the 1st Earl of Peterborough.

And going through this list of names,

there were more Earls and Sirs and a Lady.

In fact, of the 22 residents of the piazza,

17 of them have titles,

and this is not an accident.

The leases for these houses stipulated they couldn't be divided up.

They are for single residential use only.

And what that means is that all but the very wealthiest

are priced out. And that was always the intention.

The only people who can afford to live in these houses

are the wealthy elite.

And Covent Garden, the piazza at its heart, is their exclusive space.

But one outsider does break into this world of aristocrats

and courtiers.

He does so thanks to his rare talent.

He is Richard Gibson.

Richard Gibson was an artist,

specifically, a portrait miniaturist.

He moves into Covent Garden

probably a few years after

he's married in 1641.

And he's recorded as living on Long Acre off the piazza.

Miniaturists were considered to be of gentlemanly status.

And one of the really interesting things about the artists

who lived in Covent Garden is that the nobility

and even the royal family would visit them at home.

These houses in Covent Garden were grand enough

for people to travel to them, and it's very, very important,

particularly for miniatures, that a studio is clean.

So this lovely clean, fashionable area

is going to be very attractive to somebody like Gibson.

So this is a portrait miniature by Richard Gibson.

He works in a very, very specific way

that's slightly different to other miniaturists working at the time.

He is working in a more painterly style.

You can see how brilliant Gibson was at painting

fabric drapery.

It's quite an experience going to an artist studio,

particularly a miniaturist studio.

You would have to have gone to his studio around six to eight times.

And at this period there's a real interest in

watching people paint, which is why it was so important

to live somewhere like Covent Garden

where your house was also interesting and pleasant

and beautifully furnished, easy to get to.

But of course, Richard Gibson, who describes himself

as a dwarf, he signs his little portrait miniatures

with the initials DG, which stand for Dwarf Gibson.

Being a man of short stature,

there's also a curiosity there with how this person

who looks so different to everybody else

is managing to produce these beautiful portrait miniatures.

Richard Gibson is sitting for a friend here,

he's sitting for someone who knows him incredibly well.

It's obviously a play on his height because you've got this comparative

bust there,

but there's a sort of "Man who's made it" look in his face.

Interestingly, he changes his signature from DG to RG

at the end of the 1660s.

And I think this must indicate

a change in how he felt about himself.

He's, by now, incredibly well established as an artist.

He doesn't have to

present himself quite so much as dwarf first, artist second.

So it's definitely a change in how he was starting to view himself

and how he wanted others to view him.

He seems to have crafted his life rather beautifully.

Richard Gibson's achievement is especially impressive

because the piazza's early years are among the most turbulent

in English history.

In 1642, tensions between the king

and parliament lead to civil war.

The civil war would have had a terrible impact,

not just on Covent Garden, but the whole of the city.

London, in some ways, ground to a halt.

Business stopped,

international trade trickled to almost nothing at all,

and quite a lot of the quality,

the aristocrats and the merchants of the city,

would have left, either to go to their country houses

or to exile in Europe.

And so, you have this space which

no longer really works as a residential space.

So the Russell family have to find another way

of generating some kind of revenue.

So you hear, by about 1649,

that there was a marketplace,

and this slowly, I think, became bigger and bigger.

I had quite a difficult childhood.

My dad, um, struggled coming back from WWII.

He found it very difficult just to assimilate back into society.

So he had quite a big drink problem.

My parents split up and my two brothers were, more or less,

on the street fending for themselves.

I was a little bit younger.

Um, I ended up

on my own for a few days where my mum thought I was with my dad

and my dad thought I was with my mum, but I wasn't.

And I was living on my own as a little boy.

I was taken from there down to stay with my uncle,

down in Hampshire, in Winchester,

and then they couldn't really contain me

and I was sent from there to different homes, and then I went

into the Merchant Navy. So I spent a few years

travelling around the world and came back when I was 18.

And that's when I went into the market.

I'm a totally, absolutely totally, uneducated person.

So I could barely read and write.

I thank Covent Garden Market

for my life. I've got to where I've got

because of Covent Garden Market.

They, it taught me.

And anybody who survived it and you could do it,

you'd go anywhere. Anywhere.

So, ah, a lot to be thankful for.

By 1660, the civil war is over.

And with the party loving Charles II, the monarchy

bounces back to the throne.

For Covent Garden, it's both a restart

and a new chapter.

In 1661, Thomas Killigrew, who is a courtier and a playwright

and who lives just over there at number 8, The Great Piazza,

is given a permit by Charles II

to build a new theatre. And what he builds

is the Theatre Royal Drury Lane that you can see

just over there, less than a minute's walk

from the piazza.

The first star to light up Drury Lane

sets tongues wagging as she passes along this street.

She is the original poor girl who hit the big time,

Nell Gwyn.

For a young girl like Nell, seeing the Theatre Royal Drury Lane

open for the first time

would've been a really exciting moment.

Bearing in mind,

if she was only 11 or 12, she'd have no memory

of theatre existing beforehand.

She worked in her mum's brothel at that point.

In the records, it talks about her serving them drinks.

And Nell didn't waste any time getting a job

as an orange seller at Drury Lane.

And that's probably where she

found her love of theatre, and, certainly, where she started

to get a vocabulary about what it meant to be on stage.

Because by 1665, she was on stage herself.

Bearing in mind, this is a woman who had no education,

who was illiterate, so she had to learn all of her part

by people reading the part to her and her remembering.

It's a pretty huge act of memory. It's very impressive.

She was so full of spark

and humour and I think it must've been an ability

to improvise, as well, to really think on her feet.

One of the really appealing things about the theatre at that time

was the amount of interaction that there was with the audience.

And so there's a lot of interplay and a lot of asides

where Nell would give a line to the audience

because she seemed to have no fear and, in fact, rather than saying,

"I want to forget the fact that I was part of the brothel,"

she mentions the fact that she's a whore and she's not ashamed of it.

One of the elements of the theatre at the time

was that the actresses were pretty accessible to men

and a lot of the reason why people came to the theatre

at all was to watch the actresses. In fact, you could pay a penny

to watch the women getting changed backstage at this time.

This image of Nell Gwyn

in some ways is quite unusual because she's got clothes on.

But I think if you look closely in her face,

you can see that there's a little bit of a raised eyebrow there

that what she's really saying is, "If you come backstage with me,

"then, you know, who knows what will happen?"

By the time she met Charles II,

she was on her way up and the fact that Nell

had a celebrity admirer and was, you know, in cahoots

with the king, would've been a massive up for her

in terms of her status, in terms of the theatre, the bookings,

the ticket sales.

Theatre was a gathering point for the whole of society.

And so, you could go to the theatre and pay a penny

and be guaranteed that you'd see the king there.

Pepys actually referred to looking at the audience, rather than looking at the stage.

All the pleasure of the play was, the king

and my Lady Castlemayne were there,

and pretty, witty Nell, which pleased me mightily.

The fact that you could've gone to the theatre

and watched Nell Gwyn on stage, knowing that she was the king's

mistress, and not only that, probably that the king was there too.

To watch Nell and the king flirt in front of you

must have been the best kind of reality TV of its time.

She went on to become one of the greatest celebrities

of her day and would've been then the star of Covent Garden.

The man that we know as Dr John Ponteus

is a skilful,

charismatic,

intelligent...

possibly helpful person.

So John Ponteus sets himself up just off of the piazza at Covent Garden,

treating the people that live around him.

So he sets up his medical practice and his home there.

As part of a sales pitch, he publishes these medical books

where he puts recipes for various treatments for various conditions.

For the biting of a mad dog,

take mints, a clove of garlic

and salt, stamp them together

and lay to the bitten place

and this will heal it.

When it comes to our understanding

of looking back at what medicine was like,

we would probably see it as there being a very fine line

between science and quackery.

So there's an entry in a record

of the St Paul's Church in Covent Garden

of Margaret, daughter of John Ponteus,

on the 12th of April, 1665,

that she is buried.

And beside the entry are three telltale letters,

She has died of plague

and I think it's likely

that she would be the first person

in the Covent Garden piazza area

to contract and die of plague in 1665.

But this is a normal burial.

This is not your usual plague burial

where family and friends are not supposed to be there.

If I was to put money on it, and I'm not a betting woman,

I'd potentially say that there was a

fairly large scale cover up

of this plague death.

Why does Ponteus cover it up?

Well, this is a time when somebody like Dr Ponteus

can really rake in the money, because they're aware

this is coming their way,

they're going to be worried that perhaps plague

might visit, that it might even be at the very mouth of the Thames.

People are frightened and they're going to want treatments

to see off the plague.

If somebody had reported that Margaret had contracted plague,

and indeed had died of plague,

her father and any members of that household

are going to be locked up

for 40 days plus.

So if you can't work for that period of time,

it probably isn't going to do particularly well

when it comes to earning money.

We think of him as being a money grubber.

But it's entirely possible that

he covered up the plague because he thought

he had some cure for it.

That is me being very kind.

Against the plague, take three ounces of the liquor

of the inner rind of the ash tree, with three ounces

of white wine, and give the patient every three hours,

and within 24 hours, he shall be well,

by the grace of God.

Potentially, around 15% of the population of London

were lost during this bout of the plague

and that it may possibly have been over 100,000 people that died.

After the plague, the piazza is never the same again.

Fear of infection accelerates the flight of the aristocrats.

And so the market improves its toehold

in this space, receiving a royal licence

that is today memorialised in a colossal bronze plaque.

What it tells us is that May 1670, King Charles II

issued a grant to the 4th Earl of Bedford

to hold a market in Covent Garden Piazza

on every day of the year except Sundays and Christmas Day

for the buying and selling of all manner of fruit,

flowers, roots and herbs.

The middle of the night is the beginning of a new day

for the night workers in the market,

and there's only one 24 hours in the year where these streets

are quiet from one midnight to the next.

Everything that comes to the garden finishes its journey by hand and head

and trolley into the shops.

Every time I came here, my heart lifted as I walked here,

because you never knew what was going to happen next.

Firstly unloading and delivering,

then the long job of sorting and setting up for sale.

Roses and chrysanthemums in long wooden boxes.

The scenes in that of the porter folding back the tissue paper

on the boxes of chrysanthemums,

that, yeah, I've done thousands and thousands and thousands of them.

That stand he was on, standing them up 10-15 high,

I did that every night of the week.

Half past four in the morning and everything's ready.

Fruit and vegetables start selling at five.

And by seven o'clock, buying is brisk.

In the flower market, the salesmen are in

and so are the customers.

If you went to the flower market in what they call the Scilly Season,

where all the stuff comes from the Scilly Isles,

the scents were just unbelievable. Lovely.

It was a joy to come to work.

By 1670, the market is licensed

and official, but it's still restricted to just a few shacks

up against the wall on the southern side.

The rest of the piazza remains, as it had been intended,

as an exclusive space.

But then everything changes.

The catalyst is that another acquisitive member

of the Russell family now owns the piazza,

the 1st Duke of Bedford.

In 1705, he develops the southern side,

building yet more houses.

He also enlarges the market

by moving it into the centre of the piazza.

This once empty space

is now filled with the noise and the energy

of commerce.

62 local residents send the duke a petition,

complaining that trades people are invading their space.

There is the stench and the filth of the market and disturbances

frequently happen by the great number of profligates

and disorderly people who frequent the square.

Just 70 years after it was created

exclusively for the well to do,

the piazza is now a contested space,

and a colourful new era begins.

This is very surreal.

Oh, my goodness.

It's cool to kind of be put into this space

and to see it all happening.

And you can imagine, kind of,

the hackney coaches moving past.

I'm standing where the market would be.

Maybe street beggars on the sides

and ballad singers and things like that all, kind of,

moving around you.

And the, kind of, the chaotic sounds of,

ah, kind of, the hustle and bustle of so many people flooding through.

For a man who likes urban contract,

Covent Garden, in the early 18th century, has it all.

It has both high culture,

in the sense that the theatres are there,

and it has, um,

the teeming popular culture of the market.

For Joseph Addison, there wasn't another place like it.

Joseph Addison is a wit and bon viveur.

He's the classic urban writer and one of the people

who, sort of, helps define that idea of the city

as a place where writing and culture can thrive.

So Addison set up a coffee house called Button's,

in Russell Street, just off the piazza.

It's not somewhere you go for a quiet cuppa.

If you go there in the evening or in the afternoon,

you'll be sure to find, um, some interesting writers

who you can talk to,

theatre directors, actors.

They were probably over-caffeinated often.

This is a noisy place,

a noisy place full of conversation and talk, and that talk

is serious in the sense that it's about things that matter.

Politics, religion, gossip,

sexual scandals, all the kind of things

that go on in a modern urban political society.

So there's sort of the idea of public opinion

was being formed in the coffee house.

Button's is just the start.

In the early 1700s, The Three Chairs Tavern,

the Bedord Coffee House

and the Shakespeare's Tavern

all take over grand houses in the piazza.

Covent Garden is acquiring a reputation

for nightlife.

One that will echo on for centuries.

In this converted fruit warehouse in Covent Garden,

for a £10 membership fee, night after night, the patrons can do

this sort of thing. In this cellar, you can hardly hear yourself speak,

but no-one seems to complain.

Just there was a very, very famous club called Middle Earth.

Which you'd go in on a Friday and stagger out

on a Monday.

My name is Sharon Sickles and I first came here well over

40 years ago

as a young girl and I was just hooked.

It was just the most brilliant club.

Marc Bolan started there, jamming at the end of each night.

Before he was famous.

I am the god of hellfire and I bring you fire.

Arthur Brown, do you remember his song Fire?

Well, he had a flaming hat,

but the whole thing went up and we were all evacuated,

you know, out onto the pavement.

Brilliant nights.

By the early 1700s, London is overtaking Paris

to become the biggest city in Europe.

The capital dominates the nation. It's home to one in ten

of the population, and some of the wealth

and some of the opportunity that draws people here

comes from London's position at the centre

of an expanding British Empire.

The trade with India, but also the Atlantic slave trade,

generate enormous profits and much of that wealth

remains concentrated in London.

And some of it is spent here in the piazza.

Among those getting their hands on the wealth

that pours into 18th century Covent Garden

is a complicated character called Moll King.

Moll King is one of the most amazing entrepreneurs

of 18th century London.

She really comes with very little fortune into the world,

she has to make her own way, but as a young woman,

she gravitates toward Covent Garden.

She puts together a little bit of cash herself

and then she does something really canny.

She marries up.

So she finds a young man

who she calls Smooth-faced Tom

and he's an old Etonian, and between them,

they stump up enough cash

to buy the small wooden building

right outside the portico of St Paul's churchyard.

And they start turning it into a coffee house.

Just bare boards, some rudimentary trestle tables

and furniture, something that's very rough and ready.

What was different about Moll's was that it was associated

with drinking alcohol.

And it was here also that the elites rubbed shoulders

with the market traders.

And, interesting enough, lower class women,

what we would call sex workers, who went there to offer their services.

Moll King is very careful not to allow

any prostitution, any actual sex, to take place

on her premises.

But Moll King and her husband Tom make a huge fortune.

They buy a plot of land in Hampstead

and are able to build their own country house villa.

So we're talking more than just a few shillings here and there

from running a coffee house. Where are they getting this money from?

The answer is she's effectively

the banker to the market traders and to the sex workers

in Covent Garden.

And she charges a higher rate to the sex workers

than she does to the market traders.

So they were people who owed her money, and as long as they

stayed on the right side of her, there were no bad consequences.

She's ruthless.

She has a different set of morals and a different moral code

than a woman of her status is expected to have.

In this space, designed for the elites, for the aristocrats,

you have this opportunistic culture of entrepreneurs

and market traders, but also other kind of shadier types

moving in as well.

So Covent Garden, in general,

started to take on the character

of a red-light district.

If you look at Morning from The Four Times Of Day,

it's a cold winter's morning in the piazza in Covent Garden.

The first thing that strikes you, right in the middle,

is this thin, grand looking,

older lady,

marching across towards St Paul's Church.

Now, she's clearly going to church early,

seven o'clock in the morning.

And behind her is her little pageboy, shivering,

holding her prayer books under his arm.

But in front of the church where she's heading

is Tom King's coffee house.

And inside you can see people fighting, they're holding up staves.

And in front, there are two couples embracing.

Hogarth specifically cites Morning

in Covent Garden

because the piazza to Hogarth

was the living heart of his world.

Hogarth was a painter and has been called the grandfather

of British satire.

He was born into a poor family,

but he wanted to improve his drawing

so he joined an academy run by Sir James Thornhill,

which was in one corner of the Great Piazza.

And five years later, he married,

rather against Thornhill's approval,

Thornhill's daughter Jane.

And they lived on the opposite side of the square, the south-eastern corner.

But also, there was something about the way that

he draws the piazza or that life.

There are great scenes in taverns

and they're very much Covent Garden people.

He hated hypocrisy and he felt very sympathetic

to the poor and the outcast, the eccentric, the lonely.

And so his stuff has got that rich life of the streets in it.

But it's also the contrast between

the meanness of the upper classes, who actually

were leaving the piazza at this stage

because they didn't want to be there with all this brouhaha,

um, and the life of the street, which is much more vivid

and much more alive.

The people are taking over.

The whole of this area was a family.

Everybody helped one another.

We went to one another's funerals,

we went to one another's weddings,

we went to their parties.

A whole language out there that we spoke

that was different.

We didn't have a lot, but what we had

was the most we were ever going to get, so,

yeah, it's life.

I've travelled all over the world, literally.

But there was always the feeling,

"No, I've got to bury my bones back here."

I suppose you might as well call it coming home, really.

At least one aristocrat still calls Covent Garden home

right up until the middle of the 18th century.

He clings on inside the wedding cake grandeur of this house.

Later, it would be the site of the nightclub Middle Earth.

Today, it's an outlet for a make-up brand founded

by a social media influencer.

Lord Thomas Archer, who lives there

at number 43 King Street,

is the last of the aristocratic residents

to leave the piazza.

After he departs in 1757,

there are none.

With the last of the aristocrats gone,

this space creates its own glamour.

My name's Louise Heard, and my relation to Covent Garden Piazza

is that I have been

working this shop since

about 1988, in fact, actually, a bit before that

when I was a teenager.

And I lived in southeast London and, um,

was just desperate to get out to this place called Covent Garden.

And to come up here was just really exciting for me.

It was just very bustling, there was a lot going on outside,

there were fashion shops, there was lots of vintage clothes shops.

All the old pubs are still here, but there were also lots of cafes.

And also, like, in front of the church, that was, ah,

that was the first place you would've seen, like, street dancing

to hip-hop. I mean, it was that exciting. Everything was, kind of,

coming together in this area.

There is some kind of energy here.

And we're right in the middle of the market

in Covent Garden.

And I think that there's some kind of theatrical ley lines

that, sort of, converge in Covent Garden Piazza.

By the middle of the 1700s,

there is now a second theatre in the area,

the Theatre Royal Covent Garden.

We know it today as the Royal Opera House,

and it has an entrance leading directly out

to the piazza.

This colonnade now becomes a boulevard of dreams,

and one of the first to pass along it is a starstruck

wannabe called Charles Macklin.

Macklin is a prickly character. There's no doubt about it.

He's born Colin McLaughlin in the northwest of Ireland.

Like many Irish

before him and after him,

Macklin came to London

to, for fame, for fortune.

Before he was famous, it's fair to say that he was infamous.

He comes to big public attention in 1735

when an unfortunate backstage incident

with a fellow actor leads to a violent event.

They're squabbling over a wig, Macklin insisted this was crucial

to his part and he ends up stabbing him

in the eye with a stick.

Macklin stands trial for murder and he represents himself,

he cross examines witnesses.

He's very capable, he's very authoritative, he's very assertive.

Obviously, his acting background helps him.

He gets let off with manslaughter

and he's back acting very quickly, as well.

So when he plays The Merchant Of Venice,

and he plays Shylock in that play,

this snarling, dangerous, vicious villain,

he terrifies audiences.

He's said to have given George II

a sleepless night after the king went to see it.

This makes his name. He becomes a superstar

in the London theatrical world.

It's difficult for many to be Irish in London at this time.

There are concerns about Irish,

cheap Irish labour coming over.

There are prejudices against the Irish.

So Macklin's journey from being born

in an extraordinarily rural part of Ireland,

to become one of the most celebrated actors of the age,

is remarkable.

When London Irish people saw him act,

night after night, in them they saw opportunity.

This is a wonderful story that tells us quite a lot

about Macklin's ambitions,

but also that the Covent Garden, the area, it's a very

febrile place, a very energetic place,

a place that crackles with energy and possibility.

Looking down into the piazza today,

we can imagine the carnival that overwhelmed it

in the 18th century.

Because in 1747 one artist paints the view

from this spot.

Samuel Scott captures the people of this space

in intricate and fascinating detail.

Moll King's coffee house is in front of the church.

In a hay cart, a mother feeds her baby.

There are people from the further reaches of the empire.

A brawl breaks out, watched by two women

leaning out of a window.

Their house, on the north side,

is a brothel run by the famous Jane Douglas.

Jane Douglas was born in 1698

in Edinburgh, with a father John Douglas,

who was a black man by complexion,

and a mother, Susanna. They weren't married

and they encouraged her

to indulge in sex work

because her father owned a public house.

After her father died and her mother was arrested

for pickpocketing and transported, Jane herself

was then cast out of the city because of her reputation,

because of the way that she was very open

and bold with men.

She then moves into Covent Garden,

the piazza, in about 1735.

And there she becomes well known.

She has a quite outgoing personality. She was very good at drinking,

she had quite coarse language.

In the space of Covent Garden, this culture of debauchery

and leisure, being bold and being of character

made you popular.

In other spaces it was more appropriate

to be dainty, more appropriate to be modest.

It was the complete opposite in this space

and that worked.

She was a victim of circumstances in many ways.

But in a lot of ways she also adapted

to the, kind of, business mind and the commercial mind.

And she was well known for procuring young women

into her home,

and that's because that was the preference of the industry,

and she notably would cast out

women if they got too old

or if they started to lose their beauty.

Her brothel began to thrive.

She decorated it with lavish furnishings

and fabrics and, notably, even had a restaurant in there

with waiters, in order to allow their clients to feel like

they'd entered into a civilised place.

So her clientele tended to range from even the highest echelons

of society, particularly of the aristocracy.

Jane Douglas, she achieved,

comparably, upper middle class status

and that may not have occurred in any other space.

And there were obviously a lot of victims

who did not have the same story who were abused

and suffered because of this industry,

and I think that just shows the variety

and the, um,

the choices that a lot of women were forced into to survive.

In 18th century London, one in five women

earned some of their income from selling sex.

In the piazza, the proportion is almost certainly higher.

The life stories of most of these women

are lost to history.

But documentary evidence of this world

does exist, and it still has the power to shock.

Here in these registers of christenings,

on the 22nd of November 1752,

is a baby girl named Priscilla Passage.

And instead of the names of her parents,

she is described as a dropped child,

which is just an absolutely heartbreaking term.

This child has been abandoned

and she's been abandoned and she's been found

in the Covent Garden Piazza.

She's been given this name Passage after the place

where she was found.

Abandoned, unwanted children, that is by no means unusual

for the London of the 1700s, but what makes this problem

more acute here in Covent Garden is the area's

place as one of the centres

of London's sex trade.

A few months later, here's a baby boy called Kendrick King,

again, a dropped child.

He's been named after King Street to the north west

of the piazza, and

April 1753

is a baby girl who's been christened

Henrietta Street. Well, Henrietta Street

is the line of big houses

to the south of the piazza.

The christening of a baby implies

that the state or the authorities have stepped in

and picked up the pieces

for these abandoned children.

But books like this, which is a register

of burials for the same church,

St Paul Covent Garden, I'm afraid they tell

a much darker story.

There's a register of the burial of a dropped child,

Priscilla Passage.

This burial takes place 28 days

after her christening.

And if we go forward a few pages,

here is a record of the burial of the little girl who'd been named Henrietta Street.

This is just 20 days after her christening.

And

the little boy who'd been named after King Street,

Kendrick King, is also buried

in this church. Now, he at least got to see his first birthday,

he's a little over 14 months at the time of his burial,

but not one of these three children, born

and abandoned in Covent Garden in this short period

in the middle of the 18th century, not one of them

lived to see their second birthday.

These unwanted children are

the other side of Covent Garden's famous notoriety.

The tide of history begins to turn against the excesses

of the piazza.

By the late 1700s, people are actively addressing

society's problems and there is a new approach

to law and order, pioneered right here

by one John Fielding.

John Fielding was a magistrate

and he was dispensing law and order

on Bow Street in Covent Garden.

Bow Street sort of backs on to the north easterly corner

of the piazza.

At this time,

a magistrate is part judge, part police officer.

Which, on the one hand,

it seems like if you're going to do that job, this is probably the best place

to do it, because you are surrounded by all kinds

of criminal activity at this stage.

But also, it's kind of a hard job to do.

The act of exchanging money for sex

is not illegal, but there are activities around it

which are, so even in just one pub, for example,

you could have pickpocketing, you could have counterfeiting,

you could have licensing fraud, you could have soliciting.

And the way that the justice system worked, it's known categorically

that it's corrupt.

The accused themselves, if they were a person of means,

could, you know, bribe the magistrate and that was just known

that that's how it worked.

But John Fielding really seems

to have been trying to make a change,

trying to build up a team around him

to be the group that don't take the bribes,

that don't succumb to any form of corruption.

We would call them the Bow Street Runners now.

At the time, typically, they were known as Fielding's People.

The image of John Fielding

says to me a man who's very comfortable

with who he is. He has a calmness within him

and, of course, I'm drawn to

a headband, which sits just above his eyes,

which indicates

that he is blind.

Whilst other people see it as a tragedy,

he sort of takes it in his stride.

It really is fascinating that it doesn't in any way seem to

have held him back whatsoever.

In a very short period of time,

he had a lot of success.

And he's years ahead of the game, really,

in terms of

what he's doing to try and

clean up the streets.

If you look at what he was doing,

you can see that that's been replicated

100 years later, 200 years later,

right up until what is happening today.

And if we take that back to the formation of the Metropolitan Police

itself, in 1829,

a lot of the systems that they use were implemented

by John Fielding.

So my path was somewhat broken

because I'd still got the wanderlust from travelling around the world.

Anyway, I left.

I came back again and I wanted to get back into the market,

so I went back to my family.

My uncle George said to me,

"We'll get you back in the market as a beadle."

A beadle is a market officer.

Their job was to police

the actual market itself.

Overseeing what was going on,

overseeing who was doing what and who was going where

and who shouldn't be where and, "What's that lot going down there

"and that shouldn't be there because that was sold by that company there."

This is where you was allowed to bring your produce out.

Your produce would go back up like that

and if the beadle came down and saw you past there,

he'd say, bang the box, kick the box, "Get it back over the line."

Because this, if you look, that's all you had to walk in.

The barrow rats come down here to pick stuff up, so it's very, very tight

and you could not come over the line.

The beadles wouldn't allow you to.

And this place was buzzing at 12 o'clock at night

when the rest of London was going to sleep.

And then you can imagine what, sort of, that drew everyone in

because the rest of London was shut down. This wasn't.

So there was lots and lots of people here.

That's why, as a beadle, you had to keep on your toes.

Every now and then, the authorities try to impose order

on the chaos of the market.

In the early 1830s,

as the young Princess Victoria awaits her coronation,

the Bedford family get rid of the clutter

of the sheds and the shacks.

From now on, the trade in fruit, veg and flowers

will happen inside a single immense market building.

Two centuries after the piazza was conceived of

as an empty space, a new era begins.

The market is now the dominant presence.

We're now in an age of economic growth,

but also growing demands for better social order.

And this new market,

with its rules and its regulations,

is all about increasing profits, but also tightening control.

So the bustling, sometimes chaotic,

fruit and vegetable market is now to be contained

within these elegant arcades and walkways.

The market, well, it has been

my life, you know?

Basically, the whole of my working life.

It's just home.

There's hundred of people working here

and you know them all.

I used to make my own things, it was handmade crafts.

I loved the fact that I was working for myself,

but now I work for my friend, because I'm, sort of, semi-retired.

There you go.

Once a shopkeeper, always a shopkeeper.

There's never a day where I don't want to come into work.

It's the uniqueness of the market.

It's essentially London and someone will always

know something that you don't.

A stroll through the market building is one of the big draws

of Covent Garden.

As Victorian London window shops amid the exotic fruits

and aromatic flowers, the piazza

claws back some respectability.

And this is still theatre land.

Along the colonnade to the Royal Opera House

comes an actor who wants to change the world,

Ira Aldridge.

Ira Aldridge was a black American

actor who was born in New York

in 1807.

But there was no avenue for him to have a career

in New York.

Slavery was still full blown. You know, New York was a free state,

but being an actor of colour was not

a known path.

Slavery was not enforced on British soil.

It was in the plantations and in colonial countries,

but not on British soil, so he came to Britain

to try.

He spent 7-8 years touring about 50 theatres

around the country, getting experience,

getting work, getting paid.

Um, and he got a good reputation. The reviews were good.

So in 1833, Edmund Kean, who was the greatest actor

of his generation,

he collapsed on stage at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden

when he was playing Othello.

And the manager of the theatre asked Ira Aldridge

to come in and take over.

People seeing someone like Ira Aldridge on stage

in a leading title role

at one of the legitimate theatres in London

would have been a huge deal. I mean, if he got this right,

his career would be made.

And also, it was completely a political act.

And I think he was very aware of it, because at the time

that he was at Covent Garden,

the vote to abolish slavery in all British colonies

was about to go through parliament.

And Ira Aldridge disproved the argument

that slavery was for the good of the negro,

you know, these are people who need guidance,

they wouldn't be able to manage on their own.

He performed well, the audience enjoyed it.

And in the press the next day,

the reviews, awful.

Mr Aldridge has nothing to recommend him for the part of Othello

but his complexion.

Some of them are just downright racist.

His foot is ugly

and he walks upon it with the heavy,

un-elastic tread of a dromedary.

In my opinion, the reviews

were a tactical move

to demerit him.

Because the newspaper owners

are powerful people who benefit

financially somewhere from slavery.

The vulgarisms of his pronunciation

is quite unheard of in good society.

So he played for two nights at Covent Garden

and then the theatre closed.

He never, ever played Covent Garden again in his lifetime.

But three months after Ira was at the Theatre Royal,

the abolition of slavery in British colonies was passed.

When I see this face, I always think he's smiling a little bit inside.

But it also has the weight of experience.

He knows more than

I think we can ever know.

He's had to battle so many things

to do what he did.

Um.

It's a good face.

The sheer velocity of London's growth in the 19th century

is just astonishing.

By the 1860s, the population was around 3 million.

That is three times

what it had been just 60 years earlier

at the start of the century.

London is a global centre of trade and finance

and the heart of a vast empire.

To satisfy the city's enormous demand for fruit,

vegetables and flowers, the market bursts out of its new building.

The market that began as just a few little sheds

on the southern side of the piazza, before being moved into the centre,

has now taken over the perimeter.

There is little left in the piazza now other than markets.

It became a victim of its own success

within a few decades.

There's reports in Punch magazine

about the streets being, basically, full of vegetable detritus

and being slimy and horrible as a result.

It was called the Mud Salad Market by Punch magazine.

This would be very, very tight here. You could hardly move.

Buzzing with porters, there'd be trolleys, there'd be barrows.

This place would be very, very, very busy.

When I first came here, it was very, very intimidating.

Very intimidating.

A lot of hard men, a lot of busy men.

They didn't suffer fools gladly.

So you had to be on your game.

There would be arguments and rows

because there'd be lorries parked up that shouldn't be parked up.

Stuff would get jammed.

If someone left anything laying about,

it disappeared rapidly.

So it was, everything was

moving. It was like its own world, its own place

if you like.

Come on, Peter. What's going about down there?

Right, here we go.

As early as the 1880s,

there were calls for the market to be moved out of the piazza.

But a sense of tradition and the lack of any obvious alternative

site means that nothing happens

for almost a century.

This book is published in 1968

and it lays out a plan for the closure

of the fruit and vegetable market

and the flower market.

Now, Covent Garden, by this point,

is no longer owned by the Bedford family,

but by a consortium of three local authorities.

And they've joined forces to make the piazza,

as they would have seen it, fit for the late 20th century.

After three centuries on its present site, the Covent Garden Market

is expected to vacate the 15 acres it now occupies

in the heart of London.

By the early 1970s,

the brave new London of the planners

is starting to take shape.

Finally, after more than 300 years,

the market is to leave Covent Garden.

Two miles to the south, in an old railway yard

just across the Thames, a new market building

is being created.

It is vast, purpose built

and has little in the way of character.

It's the end of an era as far as I am concerned. It's like

someone saying to me after you've lived in a house

for 31 years, "You have got to go to somewhere else."

And that to me, honestly, there's no two ways about it,

it just don't seem right to me. I'm sorry.

What are you going to feel about working there after working here?

The conditions can't be any worse than they are here.

Have you seen them over there?

It'll be very much easier to do your business

and perhaps the hours will be shorter and so on.

There'll be something lacking, obviously.

To the urban planners of the 1970s,

the Covent Garden Market is a relic.

And like horse drawn carts or the piazza's flower girls,

it has no place in their vision

of the future.

Late in the day, when prices have fallen,

the old ladies come around to sell their flowers in the London streets.

But things aren't what they were.

When Jenny started selling flowers on street corners,

Victoria was queen and every gentleman wore a buttonhole.

But that was a long time ago.

The flower girls were just two of the hundreds of people

that Henry Mayhew interviewed

for his pioneering work,

London Labour And The London Poor.

He met them in Covent Garden at the piazza.

And this is the first time when ordinary working people

are being allowed to tell their stories in their own words.

So there are two girls, one is 15, one is 11.

They're sisters.

We don't know their names. We know that they had very thin dresses,

cracked bonnets. One of the girls, the younger one,

she didn't have any shoes.

So she trotted along barefoot next to her sister, the 15-year-old sister.

We live on bread and tea,

sometimes a fresh herring of a night.

Sometimes we don't eat a bit all day when we're out.

What I get from their testimony is the sheer

ordinariness of their struggle. They simply take it for granted.

There is no escape. They are trapped in this cycle

of working 12 hour days for pennies.

They're only ever a few shillings away from starvation.

I've never had a sixpence given to me in my life.

Never.

I never go among boys.

We can all read.

When the older girl says that she doesn't know boys,

what that means is that she's not dabbling in prostitution.

And for them, literacy is something witch would allow them

to advance themselves later on.

Maybe become stall holders.

They might have some kind of smallholding.

They might be able to improve their life chances.

Ultimately, the flower sellers

were part of a slow,

painful social process that eventually

would lead to the foundation of the welfare state.

Ultimately, preventing people like that from ever having to go through

the struggles that they went through.

In the more short term,

what happened to them?

It might be that their famous chastity was tested

and they became prostitutes.

Perhaps they died of starvation,

of disease, of the cold.

Perhaps they struggled on. We simply don't know.

The plight of the flower girls

draws other writers to Covent Garden.

Among them is a man whose books will capture

all the wonder and all the misery

of London in the middle decades of the 19th century,

Charles Dickens.

When Dickens was about 12,

his father was arrested for debt.

His mother moved into

the prison with his father

and with their younger children.

But the young Charles was left in lodgings on his own

and every morning Dickens would walk into London

and go to work. And the route

from his lodgings would have taken him through Covent Garden.

And so Covent Garden Market was a place

where he knew what it was to be hungry,

to be cold, to be poor.

But as well as that, in Dickens's middle years,

he ran two magazines,

first, Household Words, and then All the Year Round.

First of all, their offices were in Covent Garden.

So it was a place he more or less lived.

And he used the market for copy.

He writes about going to the market

and stopping at one of the church porches

where, as he says, a bunch of unidentifiable

lumps are sleeping, which turn out to be children.

One of the worst night sights to be found in London

is the children who prowl about this place.

They sleep in the baskets, they fight for the offal,

they dart at any object they think that they can lay their hands on

and are perpetually making a blunt pattering on the pavement

of the piazza with the rain of their naked feet.

His true empathy

for what he calls these houseless children

is so strong, I think, because of his own childhood.

When I had money enough, I used to go to a coffee shop

and have half a pint of coffee and a slice of bread and butter.

When I had no money, I took a turn in Covent Garden Market and stared

at the pineapples.

I think in the end,

the piazza to Charles Dickens

was a place of possibility.

Whether the possibility was good or bad,

I don't even think he knew.

But, as well as that, one of the

things that we forget about cities

is that they're not of a certain period, that we live in

cities that are constantly evolving.

And Dickens was particularly aware of this

and how it's never just today.

It's always yesterday, as well.

It was something that he was very profoundly aware of.

A century after the death of Charles Dickens,

the space he knew so well is no longer

slowly evolving.

It faces drastic change.

Because moving the market is just the beginning

of the planners' ambitions in the late 20th century.

This plan states

that Covent Garden Piazzas, the first of London squares,

is now, in the late 20th century, obsolete.

And then it goes on to use the key buzz phrase

of post-war planning,

comprehensive redevelopment.

There's to be new offices, a new conference centre,

some new housing and lots of new widened roads,

some of them running underground.

There are aspects of Covent Garden that survived.

The church and the market building itself

are to remain, but other than that,

this is Covent Garden erased.

This is the obliteration of a part of London that is

and always was special. A part of London

that for three centuries had operated

and existed in certain ways, that had played a certain function

in history, that adapted and changed over the years,

but this isn't change.

This is revolution. This is brutalism

not just in architectural style, but in an attitude

to what cities are and what they mean to people.

350 years after it was created

as London's most dramatic open space,

the final nail is about to be banged

into the coffin of the piazza.

My name's Jim Monahan and we're here quite early in the morning

at Covent Garden Market.

People in the area, the residents and the workers,

got together and a sort of community group has sprung up.

Very emotional public meetings were held.

The main task to begin with was

to let people know in the area what

was proposed.

And one of the most effective ways was the poster that was done,

just slapping it on buildings saying, "GLC's going to demolish this building,"

and filling in the date. People just didn't know, you know?

And suddenly, overnight,

people actually were, literally, in the street saying,

"What on earth is this? What do you mean pulling this building down?"

Suddenly, there was a realisation that something was up

and suddenly the campaign really started.

I think that youth sort of says, "Do it."

You didn't think about whether you were going to succeed or not.

What I'm trying to say is to keep us all together.

You'll break up the community which is happy.

She's happy and you'll never get anywhere else in London.

When this plan is carried through, there will be actually more flats,

more people living here than there is at the present.

But not ours. But there'll be such rents as people can't afford.

What can we do?

Marches and standing outside of town halls.

This is what we've got to do. We've got to let them know we're here.

Should we drink to that right now? We're not bloody going.

Up the belly and down the back, every hole and every crack,

I painted her down in Drury Lane,

I painted her old tomatoes over and over again.

The market closes forever

on the 8th of November 1974.

Micky Mole witnesses the death

of a 300-year-old tradition.

It was heartbreaking to see the, um,

the rubbish and the junk all thrown everywhere and

the,

the soul of the market had been just ripped out

and thrown across the floor. It's what it looked like to me, anyway.

Because I was a beadle, they left, really,

on that night-time, just me here with the keys.

It was cold,

it was, um, a slight breeze was blowing up

and stuff was flapping about in the wind.

Doors were banging.

It was quite eerie.

It affected me, I don't know, I've often thought about this

over the years. Why did it affect me so much?

After all, it's only a job.

But it wasn't. Not for me, because

all my family worked here.

My grandfather, my dad, uncles, cousins,

relatives

worked here for years and years and years and years.

And it was as if it was part of my soul, part of me.

And they'd just taken that away and destroyed it.

Although the market traders are gone,

the future of this unique space

is secure.

The campaigners fighting to save the piazza

convinced the government to give around 250 local buildings

preservation orders,

what's known as listing.

When that decision was made in '74,

to list 250 buildings,

that basically killed the plan.

Bang. So that was when the official

plans for this area were dead.

So for a time, it was brilliant.

It was a vacant site and there was this reckoning about what's going to happen.

It was an absolutely amazing flowering of community action

and different activities taking place.

Festivals were held,

the garden was rebuilt.

This is a programme for a community festival

and we elected our king and queen and we marched around the area.

We had a fantastic weekend.

We had street performers, competitions,

theatre.

Our own beer tent.

That was very successful.

And then we set up a housing co-op and began doing our own housing,

some of which survived.

It was really exhilarating.

Really remarkable.

And all of that's gone.

You know, in retrospect, the biggest mistake

we ever made was we never

got into actually getting an ownership of the land,

and the property market doesn't hang about.

In the 1980s, the piazza is sold to a private landlord.

Under their ownership, this space has filled with cafes,

restaurants and big brand shops.

A lot has changed.

But the piazza as it is today

would still be easily recognisable to the people

who lived and who worked here in the 18th or the 19th centuries.

And that sense of continuity

means that Covent Garden is one of those places

where it feels like history is close to the surface.

It's one of those places where,

if we're open to the idea, it is almost

possible to sense the presence

of the earlier generations, the people with whom

we, in a way, share this space.

It's been repurposed and at the weekends when this place is

absolutely, as we say, rammo, it's got lots of energy.

So it hasn't died, it's just morphed into something different.

And I'm glad it has because

it's still got a life.

It's alive.

This film is part of a bigger national project

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the UK differently.

You can explore other famous shared spaces

and their histories by downloading

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