By Elliott West
Introduction
Exiting the tube station and walking the short distance to the former fruit and flower market, you will pass a stream of tourists, shoppers, mime artists and musicians. Covent Garden is now a shadow of its former self with the surroundings no longer crowded with vans and crates of fruit and men turning the air blue as they jostle for space, not afraid to bump an offending vehicle out of the way when parked for too long. This market metropolis was like a family heirloom with traders passing their jobs down the generations. An ant race in confined conditions but loved and necessary to put a crust on the family table.
This is a place where both Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw spent time and the street urchins, flower girls, and prostitutes flocked to in the Victorian era. An abandoned generation that lived away from the radar of society, cold, hungry, living and surviving in the shadows of Covent Garden. A far cry from the romanticised view of Pygmalion and the musical version of My Fair Lady. The Rex Harrison of the day would walk by, throwing the odd penny towards the eyes in the dark that cried out for money.
History
Covent Garden Market has been at the heart of London’s bustling community since 1670. A market first granted a private charter by King Charles II to the Earl of Bedford. A charter that allowed the market to be held every day apart from Sunday and Christmas Day. Traders would gather to sell a mix of commodities both legal and illegal in this beautiful London piazza. In the early days, this is where prostitutes used to ply their trade and theatregoers used to come to watch plays and listen to opera. Yet as the market evolved by the 1900s, Covent Garden had been firmly established as a fruit and flower market. Produce was shipped from countries such as Holland and Morrocco and then trucked to the market from Scotland. It soon became the number-one price-setting market in Britain and almost a third of fruit and vegetables came here. Equivalent to one million tonnes and worth £65 million. A fifth of its produce was then transported around the country to other markets.
Expansion
By the 1800s, the market could no longer cope with the influx of trade and even after the creation of the Covered Market in 1834 and the Jubilee Market in 1904, the market still struggled to cope with the volume of traffic. Bottlenecks were a constant problem, caused by the lack of access to the Strand and Long Acre. It got to a point where they just ran out of room. In the end, the Covent Garden Estate was sold to the Beecham family in 1918 and there was a failed attempt in 1920 to hand over the running of the market to London County Council.
In 1927 came the first attempt to move from Covent Garden to another but that too failed due to public opposition. A 1928 plan to develop the area also failed. It was only at the outset of World War II that stopped the developers in their tracks and with London on its knees after the war, the coffers were too empty to even attempt to create a solution. After a lull, a government review of the market in 1955, eventually saw Covent Garden go into public ownership in 1962 when it became the municipal Covent Garden Market Authority (GGMA).
The Death of Covent Garden
The government now desperate to move the site, spent two years (1964-66) debating a bill to move Covent Garden to a bigger site but it wasn’t until 1974 that the shutters finally came down with the creation of New Covent Garden in Nine Elms, a 70 acre site that had space for 45 acres of fruit stalls and 16 acres for flowers. With the vacation of the old site, it turned into a temporary ghost town. A relic of the past and if it hadn’t been for the local community groups who had previously tried to prevent the closure, then social decay would have set in. These people arranged street parties, music events, and arts and crafts in the shadow of the site and painted the buildings with art from artists of the time. The central building opened as a shopping centre in 1980 and 2006, a property firm bought the market buildings, along with several other properties, turning it into a plaza of high-end shops and eateries.
