Covent Garden: Street Theatre Heaven or Shopping Mecca?

One of London's most popular tourist destinations has hit the headlines recently, with speculation that the new owners of Covent Garden want to reduce the number of street performers who ply their trade on the market's cobbled streets.

Visitors to this popular retail and entertainment district can discover Covent Garden's rich and varied history with a Walk Talk Tour mp3 guided tour. A Walk Talk Tour is a downloadable travel guide that visitors can listen to as they explore the sights in some of Britain's most visited cities. Recent excavations under the London Transport Museum building revealed that Covent Garden was the hub of a thriving Saxon settlement called Lundenwic, with its own port on the nearby Thames. This area was then abandoned when the Vikings invaded, to be later cultivated by the monks of Westminster Abbey, or Westminster Convent, as it was then known.

Controversy is nothing new for Covent Garden. The piazza designed by Indigo Jones in the seventeenth century was intended to be one of London's most desirable addresses, but the well heeled residents gradually moved West to Soho and Mayfair. The piazza took on an altogether different character as Turkish baths, taverns and rooms to rent - no questions asked - abounded. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century the area was a notorious red light district.

The central market halls were added in the 1830s. The fruit and vegetable market moved to Nine Elms, in Wandsworth, in 1974. The Market reopened in 1980. It is now populated with eateries, emporiums and the like. The London Transport Museum is now housed in the former Covent Garden Flower Market Hall. There are plenty of interactive and stimulating activities inside designed to bring out the 'big kid' in all of us.

I hope that any difficulties relating to the number of street entertainers operating in Covent Garden can be resolved. It would be a real shame if London's answer to Boston's Fanueil Hall Market Place/Qunicy Market or Edinburgh's Royal Mile were to lose any of its colourful characters that help create its unique atmosphere.

To hear an audio sample from the Museum, Galleries & Performing Arts Walk Talk Tour click here