Up West

by Pip Granger

  The market was centred around the Piazza, which was laid out by Inigo Jones in the 1630s as a smart, public open space in the Italian style, with the back of the Duke of Bedford’s mansion on the Strand marking out the south side and fine houses and St Paul’s church on the other three. The Duke had ambitions to provide gracious homes for the elite, and an elegant square for the important business of promenading. It was vital to see who was in town, what they were wearing and so on: being seen was equally important, as was picking up news and scandal.

  Given this, it’s surprising that the Duke should allow a rather ramshackle market to set up shop on the south side of this handsome public amenity. A daily general market started there in a small way in 1649, selling, among other things, local produce and crockery, from temporary stalls and a few hardly more permanent buildings – sheds, basically – erected on the south, up against the wall of the Bedfords’ gardens. A century later, the market had more or less taken over the Piazza, supplying much of West London with many of the necessities and one or two of the luxuries of life, including caged birds, cooked food and ‘Geneva and Other Spirituous Liquors’.

  From the start, the market was a chaotic, congested affair, almost entirely conducted in the open air. By the 1830s, the managers of the Bedford Estate, which still administered the market and collected tolls, had engaged a man named Fowler to design some permanent market buildings. Fowler had made his name designing an elegant basilica-style home for nearby Hungerford market (where Charing Cross station stands today). His buildings at Covent Garden, with a frontage to the west uniting three ranges of buildings running east to west, still stand today, although they have been smartened up quite a bit. The Clean Air Act of the fifties, the lack of horses and the absence of tons of discarded fruit and veg have all helped to keep them that way.

  The managers of the Covent Garden Theatre built the Floral Hall as a private flower market in the 1860s. It was a commercial failure, and was bought by the Bedford Estate in 1887 to be a foreign fruit market. The Estate made further improvements, culminating in the opening of the Jubilee Hall in 1904, before selling out to the newly formed Covent Garden Estate Company in 1918. They remained in charge until 1961.

  Although the very occasional visits I made with my father are imprinted on my memory, I cannot pretend that the market was ever central to my life. It was, after all, across the Great Divide of the Charing Cross Road. I was mainly aware of it from its customers: the little old ladies who sold bouquets and buttonholes at street corners, or to theatre and cinema queues – London’s flower market was also in the Garden, along the north side, where Great and Little Hart Street had been renamed Floral Street in its honour; and the men who trundled their barrows along Old Compton Street in the early morning on their way to set up their flash* in Berwick Street, Rupert Street or the pitches in the side streets just off Oxford Street.

  My main memories from my few youthful visits are of the great press of people and vehicles in the narrow streets, and the way the smells of the countryside – horse dung, cabbage, mould and earth – predominated in the centre of the city. I also remember how, in the hours up to lunchtime, the lorries that filled the streets around the market helped my stumbling efforts to read by having exotic addresses painted on their cab doors: Wigan, Bridgend, Daventry, Ammanford – they could have been Budapest or Timbuktu as far as I was concerned. Men – often young men in mufflers, with the inevitable ciggies stuck to their lower lips, or dogged and tucked behind their ear for later – swarmed over the backs of the trucks, building teetering loads of boxes, crates and cartons, all held together with faith, ropes and tarpaulin.

  For the children who actually lived in Covent Garden, of course, the market was a vital presence at the very centre of their daily lives, one that everyone I talked to looked back on with great affection. It was often part of their journey to or from school; a mysterious, echoing and empty space when the market was closed, and a fascinating, noisy and jam-packed one when it was open. It was a place of opportunities to be exploited, where they could fill their senses with rare and exotic sights and scents, and often the source of their family’s livelihood.

  For some, the market, empty or working, was part of an urban playground. Mike O’Rouke, who lived on the corner of Shelton Street and Mercer Street, remembers it clearly. ‘I was always up there,’ he told me. ‘We used to go down where the main Piazza is, we used to get boxes and piles of sacks, you know, and you could climb up those, and play run-outs – you could hide for hours on end down there. We used to play run-outs round the streets, all up and down Long Acre, Langley Street, Neal Street.’

  The back yards and alleys of the streets near the market also provided places for young Mike to play. ‘On Mercer Street, where my grandparents lived, there was – still is – a big opening behind them, and we used to have sacks and boxes there, and you could squeeze through the gate and you could make camps, climb about – just climbing in general, you know.’

  ‘Covent Garden market was a playground to us,’ Ann Lee remembers. ‘It was only up the road. Mum knew a lot of the people that worked there, because they all sort of grew up together – I should imagine there were some who worked there who weren’t local, but I didn’t meet any.’ In fact, in the fifties, a lot of the market’s workforce lived south of the river, but a fair few lived locally. Mike O’Rouke’s family, for instance, had been involved in one way or another for generations.

  The O’Roukes were mostly porters and traders, but there was plenty of work supporting the market, too. Ann Lee remembers that ‘Mum had a little cleaning job actually in Covent Garden market, and she used to take me in to the office with her – you know, the old-fashioned telephones, and the old-fashioned typewriters . . . I can see myself sitting at the desk – and as she walked through, it was “Morning, Kit”, “OK, Kit?” and “Goodnight, Kit”, and I thought, “My mum knows everybody”, but it was because a lot of local people worked there, in the market.’

  It wasn’t just the locals who saw the marketplace as entertainment. The everyday business of the market was a tourist attraction in itself, and I suspect that was why I was there with Father (well, that, and the out-of-hours drinking opportunities): we were tourists from across the Great Divide. Several guidebooks recommended a visit. Paul C, for example, on one of his trips to London to sample the delights of Soho, remembers that, one early summer morning after a very late night, ‘I went to Covent Garden, just to look round. It was a most extraordinary display of vegetables and flowers, and it was full of “characters”, doing business, all furiously smoking and with a pencil behind the ear. They were shouting at each other in a language I could hardly understand, but obviously had something to do with money. And there were other guys in very expensive overcoats running around pointing that they wanted things, holding up fingers to show how many. I was absolutely fascinated just to watch it, and to see so much activity in a fairly small area.’

  Even in the nineteenth century the area was congested. Covent Garden had been laid out for pleasure, not commerce, and the narrow streets were easily overwhelmed by the traffic. The market was so busy that the buildings could not contain all its business, which spilled in to the adjoining streets. King Street, Henrietta Street, Russell Street, Southampton Street and Tavistock Street were usually lined with parked lorries, waiting horses and wagons, while others tried to inch their way past. As it was sited so close to the river, when the railways came to London, they could not get near it. Charing Cross was basically a passenger station, and besides only gave access to a few southern counties.

  By the fifties, trucks and lorries coming direct from farms, London rail termini and, increasingly, airports, were making virtually all the deliveries to the market, but for the buyers it was a different matter. A lot of the market’s customers relied on manpower or horsepower to get the goods home. ‘In a way it was like Victorian London, just after the Second World War,’ Ronnie Mann remembers. ‘The lorries and trains used to bring stuff up t
o town, but I would say that 75 to 80 per cent of the local traffic – you know, fruit and veg people, all the local people, even as far as Tottenham – would come by horse and cart.’

  I loved those horses: some were shire-like with great shaggy hooves, others were titchy – and rather tetchy – Shetland ponies, but, big or small, they all clip-clopped over the cobbles utterly unmoved by the chaos around them. The delicious smell of warm horse continued to provide a base to anchor the fruity and floral top notes of the market’s perfume through the fifties, although Ronnie Mann told me that the horses had virtually gone by about 1960. ‘From the time I was five or six, until I was about eighteen in 1960, I’d seen it go from 75 per cent horses and carts to maybe two or three. It was only older people kept the horse and cart.’

  The market’s influence and business spread way beyond the Piazza. The streets across Long Acre and up around the Seven Dials were full of small wholesale concerns. Some of them were virtual Aladdin’s caves. ‘Off Seven Dials there were lots of little warehouses,’ Barbara Jones told me. ‘They were all part of the market, and one of the girls at school, called Jean, her family were among the first to get hold of bananas when they came back in to the country after the war. I remember standing at this very small warehouse thing – like a greengrocer’s, only it wasn’t a shop at the front, you know – and the shutters were back, and there were boxes and boxes of bananas. They weren’t on the ration but they were so scarce that the greengrocers used to ration them, one a week for every child’s ration book.’

  Alleyways and arches between the shops, houses and warehouses led to little yards and lock-ups where, until the late fifties, horses were housed next to their wagons. ‘Down the other side of the Strand, right by Villiers Street, you had Hungerford Lane, which is now closed off. That used to be all stables,’ Ronnie Mann recalls. ‘You could go down there, and there was horses and carts there, right up to 1960.’

  The buying and selling began in earnest at six or seven in the morning and of course deliveries arrived a good deal earlier.

  Barbara Jones remembers the market in full flow very well, as she had a paper round before school for a newsagent in New Row. ‘In the market there are all the scenes that you see from My Fair Lady or whatever, only more so. And I can remember Mash & Marram, Turner & Turnell, and all sorts of names like that, and they’d be parked from New Row, all round King Street, all over, everywhere.’

  Fruit was hard to come by after the war, and for much of the fifties. It was even more out of reach for those on a limited income. When the children were on their way to school, and the market was still thronged, the stallholders’ wares could provide a virtually irresistible temptation. Ronnie Mann’s route from Bedfordbury took him through Garrick Street or King Street in to Henrietta Street, then Tavistock Street. ‘One of the things that happened in the market,’ he recalls, ‘was when they were unloading, they weren’t allowed to pick a banana or fruit, but if a thing dropped it was classified as wasted or spoilt, and the porters were allowed to pick it up and take it home. What we used to do was rush in, grab it, and run off again, and they would do their nut.’

  Local children had been grabbing and running for decades. Graham Jackson recalls his mother, who was born in the area in the early years of the twentieth century, telling him that ‘One would run through with a knife and slit the potato [sacks] open, and others running behind would pick them up.’

  A more ladylike approach could work wonders. Barbara Jones, who walked along the south side of the market on her way from her home in John Adam Street to school at St Clement Danes, recalls how ‘the market men soon got to know that I wouldn’t touch a thing on their stall – or carts, with their lovely little Shetland ponies – because I was very strictly brought up on that point. In consequence, they would give me lots of fruit as I walked past, so I arrived at school with pockets crammed – and splitting, to my mother’s despair! – and shared it all out with my friends, including those who’d managed to pinch just one piece of fruit on the way to school.’ This rather begs the question of why the others kept on stealing: it must have been the thrill of the chase and triumphant escape.

  When the market closed in the afternoon it became a very different place, hushed and echoing, full of parked and empty barrows, stacks of baskets covered in tarpaulins and the wooden frames that would support the night’s displays. Children going home from school at St Clement Danes or St Joseph’s often found a route that took them through the Piazza and the surrounding streets, so they could play in and around them, whooping through the open arcades, examining abandoned or discarded fruit or simply satisfying their curiosity. Some collected the discarded paper wrappers from around oranges, lemons and other exotic fruit. I remember these wrappers well. They were often beautifully printed with colourful scenes, not unlike the labels on wine bottles, but flimsier, like tissue paper. Some were real works of art, and they provided a splash of colour in an often dingy day-to-day world.

  Ronnie Mann recalls that ‘when we came back from school, and [the market] was all cleared up, we’d scout and pick up potatoes, cabbages – nick ’em, maybe break a box open. I mean, everybody nicked around there. It sounds ridiculous now . . .’

  Ann Lee also played in the empty market. ‘The buildings, when the market was closed, it was very quiet, very eerie; but quite exciting. We just used to go round in places where you couldn’t go when the market was alive, you could go round and have a look.’

  As the afternoon turned into evening, and the last errant street kids went home to their tea, the atmosphere changed again. Barbara Jones relished it. ‘Walking through in the evening, when it hadn’t started up again yet, there were all these grilles, big manholes, and the strips in them were really quite wide and long, and the smells of the fruit would come up from there, and of course this was the time, after the war, when there wasn’t a lot of fruit around, and that was the atmosphere; slightly cabbagey, but fruity as well.’

  Thunderously noisy most of the time, the Piazza could be so quiet on a winter’s evening that a shout or the clatter of high heels on cobblestones would bounce around the empty buildings. Barbara Jones again: ‘When it was closed, there was this strange feeling to the air that affected the acoustics of the market. If somebody in anything other than rubber soles walked down one of the other aisles, you could hear their footsteps, and your own footsteps, echoing all around. It never troubled me, but I can imagine a situation where someone thought they were being followed. You could hear people in the other aisles, but you wouldn’t know which direction they were, because the sound would bounce around. You couldn’t tell where it was coming from.’

  Around ten o’clock, the first of the workers would arrive to stir the market back into life, to open things up and get ready for the early deliveries. As theatre- and cinema-goers caught the last trains and buses home, the legion of night workers at Covent Garden headed the other way. For Barbara Jones, this, too, was a special time of night. ‘We’d go to see our friends in Great Russell Street, by the British Museum, and come back via the market at eleven or midnight, and they’d all be there setting up ready for the morning; the lights were on, the smells of all the fruit, everyone hustling and bustling, carrying those round baskets on their heads. It was all there. It was all going on.’

  John Carnera, who lived in Soho, never accompanied his father, Secundo, on his early morning trips. He remembers the market from the other end of the day. ‘Late at night, that’s when the fruit and veg would be delivered from wherever, and that’s when the market would start up, in the middle of the night, sorting out the fruit and veg ready for the buyers first thing in the morning.’

  Rolling up at Covent Garden in the early hours was part of any night out in the West End. There was one pressing reason for this, as John Carnera explains: ‘You could get a drink at Covent Garden at all hours of the night, early in the morning. There used to be a lot of drunks about . . .’

  The area around the market was indeed famous �
� or notorious – because in those days of strict licensing laws some of the public houses in the vicinity opened all night to cater for market workers. They could be very rough and ready places, to suit the clientele. Ronnie Mann remembers ‘The Essex Serpent in King Street was a pub with sawdust on the floor. Can you imagine going in to a pub nowadays with sawdust on the floor?’

  Although the cafés and pubs were open for the convenience of the market workers, they naturally attracted all sorts of night people; club-workers from Soho on their way home, dedicated drinkers, insomniacs and those who’d missed the last bus and didn’t fancy a long tramp through dark deserted streets to their own beds. Gary Winkler, who was up virtually all night running the Nucleus coffee bar in Monmouth Street, remembers, ‘When I used to go out drinking – which I did a lot – I’d have booze in my office at the coffee bar, have a few drinks and start getting squiffy, and then we’d go down to Covent Garden market for the pubs, because they opened at odd hours. And when they closed, Smithfield used to open, you could get drinks there an hour later. Covent Garden closed, say, at nine or ten, and Smithfield opened then for an hour, then you could come back in to town and start drinking at the normal pubs.’

  Ronnie Mann, who worked in the flower market in the late fifties, remembers, ‘Blokes there – the night shift started at eleven, by the time the pub opened at three or four in the morning, they’ve done four or five hours’ work and they’re looking for a drink. They don’t go in to a café, they go and have a drink. The Bell in Wellington Street, by the Lyceum, that’s where a lot of our salesmen used to go. I always used to say they’d be dead by the time they were fifty, and most of them were, ’cause they were all drinking whisky, beer, long hours, they never slept properly, they were drunk eighteen hours out of twenty-four. We used to have pots of tea, they’d have a whisky, all bleeding night. No wonder the prices of the flowers varied!’