Photographs of Covent Garden

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Covent Garden was the name given, during the reign of King John (1199 - 1256), to a 40 acre patch in what is now the centre of London. In this area, the Abbey of St Peter, Westminster, maintained a large kitchen garden throughout the Middle Ages to provide its daily food. Over the next three centuries, the monks ‘convent garden’ became a major source of fruit and vegetables in London and was managed by a succession of leaseholders by grant from the Abbot of Westminster.
In the early seventeenth century, the fourth Earl of Bedford commissioned the architect Inigo Jones to design a Piazza with arcades and a church. But by the middle of the eighteenth century a collection of stalls and shops sprawled across the centre of the Piazza and by 1830 Charles Fowler’s design for a covered market in the middle of Piazza was completed. It looked much as it does today except that the two main aisles were uncovered. The central avenue was filled with fruiters, and two conservatories on the first floor of the west terrace were filled with plants and cut flowers. The glass roofs were added separately in 1875 and 1889.
In 1964 the Covent Garden Market Authority decided to move the market to Nine Elms in Battersea and the current range of shops and restaurants moved in...