Covent Garden is a typo-like echo of a monastery's walled orchard
Around 1200 the monks of Westminster Abbey walled off a patch of fields west of London for orchards and crops. People called it the garden of the abbey and convent, and by 1515 the lease simply read Covent Garden. Centuries later, that monastic garden had become a notorious market district, then a tourist magnet.
The ground had an earlier life. Excavations in 1985 and 2005 confirmed theories by Alan Vince and Martin Biddle that an Anglo-Saxon trading town, Lundenwic, grew up here around 600, centred on today's Covent Garden and reaching from Trafalgar Square east to Aldwych. From around 886 Alfred the Great moved the population back inside the old Roman walls, and the site reverted to fields. Late Roman graves found at St Martin-in-the-Fields in 2006 suggest the area was sacred as early as 350.
By the 13th century the abbey's walled land had grown into a quadrangle of 40 acres of orchard, meadow and pasture. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1540, it passed to the crown, and in 1552 the boy king Edward VI handed it to his father's adviser John Russell, the first Earl of Bedford. The Russells kept it until 1918. The 4th Earl hired Inigo Jones to lure wealthy tenants with an Italianate arcaded square and the church of St Paul's. The layout was new to London and became a model for later estates as the city spread.
Fashion did not last. A small fruit and vegetable market had taken root on the square's south side by 1654, and taverns, theatres and coffee houses followed. By the 18th century the district was known above all for its brothels. An act of Parliament in 1813 set out to tame it, and Charles Fowler's neoclassical market hall arrived in 1830, later joined by the Floral Hall and, in 1904, the Jubilee Market.
Traffic congestion finally drove the wholesale market out in 1974, to Nine Elms about three miles away. The central building reopened in 1980 with cafés, shops and the Apple Market. The Royal Opera House is still nicknamed Covent Garden, and the Piccadilly line hop from Leicester Square station, just 300 yards, is the shortest on the Underground.
Source: Covent Garden
