Covent Garden

Covent Garden is a district of London. Its current name is a corruption of «Covent Garden»: between the end of the twelfth century and early thirteenth, in fact, there stood the garden of a convent.

In 1540 Henry VIII ordered the expropriation and Restaurant in Covent Garden became a place of market. More recently there have arisen restaurants, museums, shops, craft stalls; animated by various street artists is now one of the main tourist attractions of the British capital.

Covent Garden is also famous for its theaters. Among them the Royal Opera House stands out so much that, for lovers of Opera, «Covent Garden» and «Royal Opera House» tend to be two interchangeable names.

The district is the heart of London’s West End, surrounded by High Holborn to the north, Kingsway to the east, the Strand to the south and Charing Cross Road to the west.

The square that is at the heart of Covent Garden was the site of a fruit and vegetable market from the mid-sixteenth century to 1974, when the market was moved to Nine Elms in Wandsworth district.

To a large extent the square owes its current plant to the project which, in 1631, was commissioned by the fourth Earl of Bedford to Inigo Jones (renowned architect, set designer and costume of English Baroque era). The idea of ​​the Earl of Bedford was from Jones’s project to create a task of speculation.

The project provided an inspiring system Palladian arches, and imitated at least in part the Piazza Grande of Livorno, where, according to some, Jones had worked on the construction of the Cathedral.

The initiative of the Earl of Bedford was a success, attracting many wealthy merchants and aristocrats, in which they built their dwellings. Within a few decades the Covent Garden piazza became the most important market of England, with exotic products from distant regions of the world, surrounded by theaters and cafes.

During the eighteenth century, however, with further expansion of the fruit and vegetable market square entered a period of decline: the residents, theaters and cafes began to move elsewhere, and Covent Garden acquired the reputation of a great square of Venus, where it was allowed to all.

Subsequently, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the area was cleaned up, the barracks were torn down, and there arose in the square was created at the outdoor market, consisting of three parallel buildings, divided into stalls and surrounded by arcades in the neoclassical style.

August 7, 2010, the district has seen the opening of the largest Apple Store in the city, which is also the largest in the world.