THIS autumn 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.
‘Covent Garden has always been about small delights, not sweeping vistas, and that’s how we like it’
As a result, Covent Garden became an (1957) and Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate thriller (1972), has gone. But the bustle remains, even if, as Peter Ackroyd writes in , ‘the agile porters have turned into a different kind of street artist’. Covent Garden has always been about small delights, not sweeping vistas, and that’s how we like it. Across nearly 500 years of history, as Prof Henry Higgins sang about Eliza Doolittle, we’ve grown accustomed to her face.
