It’s life, captain, but not as we know it: Covent Garden and Soho in the era of Covid

28 September 2020

Covent Garden market - not its busiest day ever

Following our trials and tribulations in the countryside, we are convinced that a walk in Central London will see us back on familiar ground. It might even cheer us up in the face of a worrying resurgence of Covid and after dropping our daughter at her university digs, an emotionally draining experience for us all. Unbelievably, this will be the first time we have walked in town for over six months. It's also likely to be the last fine, sunny day for a while, given reports that Noah is struggling to finish his ark in time for the approaching monsoons.

Yet today’s walk just makes us more sad. London’s West End - normally so vibrant, so alive, so crowded - is now so bereft of people that its very lifeblood seems to have drained away, leaving a pale, emaciated corpse in its stead. It was Samuel Johnson who said “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford”. In 2020, this most pestilent of years, it appears that life has tired of London and fled for warmer, more hospitable climes.

The piazza with its person

Maybe it doesn’t help matters that our trail starts at Covent Garden. Normally brimming with traders and tourists, jugglers and jongleurs, its famous piazza is completely deserted. Only a handful of market traders have deemed it worthwhile to set up their stalls, while shopkeepers in the covered arcade must be hoping against hope that today’s meagre takings will cover the rent. The one upside of absent humanity is that we notice things we’ve never noticed before, even though we must have been here hundreds of times. Today the portico of St. Paul’s church, so often obscured by an acrobat atop his ladder or a burst of fire emerging unfeasibly from a showman’s mouth, stands unopposed in its Tuscan splendour.

Beryl's bench at St. Paul's church

For the first time ever, we enter the church gardens at the side and find that its main entrance is at the back - apparently the Bishop of London had insisted at its consecration in 1638 that the altar should be at its eastern side, as tradition required. This explains why the entrance facing the piazza is sealed off, which may also be the reason many visitors overlook the church’s presence. Known nowadays as the “actors’ church”, St Paul’s was built - on a tight budget - by renowned 17th century architect Inigo Jones. Its gardens are home today to rows of benches bequeathed in memory of late actors. In busier times, this magnificent garden in the middle of London would surely be described as “an oasis of calm”, but today there are more visitors in here than on the swathes of spare piazza outside.

London's theatreland - gagged and forgotten

We pass a regular post-work haunt of the mid-nineties, the Punch and Judy pub, reading in Stephen Millar’s excellent guide that diarist Samuel Pepys recorded the first such puppet show at this very spot in 1662. This at least provided more cheerful subject matter for him than the subsequent London events of 1665 (Great Plague) and 1666 (Great Fire). Traumatised by what he had seen, by 1667 Pepys was seeking solace by “frigging with Doll Lane, one of his many lovers” in nearby Russell Street, notorious for its dens of iniquity. One of the surprising aspects of today’s “double-header” walk is that it was originally the area around Covent Garden, rather than Soho, that formed the epicentre of London’s sex trade. Drury Lane - now synonymous with its Theatre Royal, which opened its doors in 1663 and is the oldest theatre in London - had amassed 107 brothels by 1725. There was even a guidebook published, Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies (or a Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar), which sold a quarter of a million copies and detailed each prostitute’s appearance and “specialities” - a sort of early Michelin guide to muck. Even Casanova was lured from his native Venice to spend time here, only to land himself in trouble at nearby Bow Street magistrates court and catch a nasty dose of syphilis to boot.

The Royal Opera House - but no singing allowed

The Theatre Royal is undergoing major renovation, good timing perhaps as the doors of London’s theatreland remain sadly shuttered to the paying public - one of the true tragedies of the pandemic playing out in front of our eyes. So many talented people - including the legions of staff behind the scenes - currently consigned to the scrap-heap of joblessness, with no obvious end in sight or prospect of adequate financial support beyond the next month. It’s very possible that, in common with many other businesses, some venues may never open their doors again. London will be much the poorer if so. But at least some workers appear to be enjoying boom times, as it’s not only the Theatre Royal that is a building site but most of the West End. The din is at times unbearable, made more extreme by the absence of competing hubbub that these streets generate in normal times. We dodge men in orange jackets as they hurry hither and thither, their wheel-barrows piled high. For a while we feel like unwanted visitors to a parallel universe ruled by some malevolent King of Construction.

Dodo day at Neal's Yard

Fleeing the noise, we reach the neighbourhood of St. Giles via pretty Neal’s Yard, usually buzzing with activity but today as dead as the proverbial dodo, even as we approach lunchtime. St. Giles has always been Covent Garden’s poorer cousin, housing the main public execution site in the Middle Ages (before this moved west to Marble Arch) and, later, a hospital for lepers. And wherever there were slums, the ever-present Charles Dickens was sure to follow with some bons mots, describing St. Giles as “a convenient asylum for the off-scourings of the night world”. It also formed the backdrop of Hogarth’s iconic Gin Lane engraving, depicting the ravages caused by widespread availability of cheap liquor (see more at: https://www.burtonsblog.com/post/getting-to-the-bottom-of-botanicals). The look and feel of the architecture has not been markedly improved by some multi-coloured office buildings, an earlier and less successful effort by the Shard’s architect Renzo Piano - perhaps he was just practising. The even more unsightly Centre Point building at Tottenham Court Road also looms large, a carbuncle-like monument to the high-rise design of the late sixties.

Regent Sounds - 1960's hit factory

We stumble from here into Denmark Street, London’s very own “Tin Pan Alley” - this is more like it! Still home to numerous music shops, with their arty but faded and shabby exteriors, Denmark Street was as much of a fulcrum for London’s sixties music scene as Carnaby Street was for fashion. Many of the legendary bands and artists of the era, including the Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Jimi Hendrix and Manfred Mann, recorded their hits at the Regent Sounds Studio, while music magazines Melody Maker and New Musical Express also had offices on the street. Then unknowns Reg Dwight (Elton John) and David Jones (David Bowie) worked or simply hung around here on their route to global stardom, although another employee of Denmark Street, Dennis Nilsen, took an altogether more macabre path - as the infamous serial killer of the recent TV series Des. Some great nostalgia here, courtesy of Mr Millar's guide!

Soho Square

It's here we depart from custom by abandoning our Covent Garden walk before its scheduled end, foregoing some further Dickensian haunts and accompanying prose. This is so that we can join another Millar walk around Soho, which should be enough to guarantee us over 16,000 steps across three and a half hours. Soho, which used to be farmland used for hunting by Henry VIII and is thought to be named after the ancient hunting cry of “so-ho!”, is busier than Covent Garden but we can still walk around virtually unimpeded by humankind. There’s also less construction work, which is a relief to the ears. Millar regales us with the history of the Greeks and the French Huguenots who settled in the area, but there are few remnants of such occupation left aside from some street names and the occasional pub (notably the French House, where Charles de Gaulle convened strategy meetings of the Free French during World War II and, just as famously, Dylan Thomas left behind the sole manuscript of his classic Under Milk Wood while on a pub crawl).

Of more modern interest are the Soho cafés and bars frequented by an eclectic mix of famous politicians, bohemians, actors and iconoclasts:

The legendary Ronnie Scott's

• Labour left-wingers such as Tony Benn, Michael Foot and Roy Hattersley (and allegedly some Soviet spies) hung out at the Guy Hussar restaurant on Greek Street, which closed its doors in 2018 but has been reincarnated just two weeks ago as Noble Rot Soho;

• The Establishment bar, now renamed Zebrano, was founded on the same street (and named in typically ironical style) by Peter Cook, as a base for the emerging satirical comedy of the sixties. The office of satirical magazine Private Eye is also nearby - though the darkness inside indicates its contributors must be heeding government advice (surely a betrayal of their purpose in life) and working from home;

• Still on Greek Street, the acting fraternity (and I use that term deliberately as not one single actress is mentioned by Millar) frequented the Coaches and Horses pub, whose “notoriously rude” landlord, Norman Balon, became a celebrity in his own right and published an autobiography called You’re Barred, You Bastards: Memoirs of a Soho Publican, a better name than most;

• Wheelers restaurant on Old Compton Street was the location for the Duke of Edinburgh’s “Thursday Club” stag events in the 1950's, again with many actors (and the Soviet spy, Kim Philby) in attendance. As dramatised memorably in the Netflix TV series The Crown, the Queen soon put a stop to his fun;

• In Dean Street, the former Colony Room Club found favour with actors, artists, painters and musicians alike - in short, the bohemians who gave rise to the area’s alternative name of “Boho”. Even Princess Margaret visited once (well, I say “even”, she seems to have visited more drinking dens in her day than most of us have had hot dinners);

• A bit further away on Kingly Street, the Bag O’ Nails club was another sixties meeting place for musicians, including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who and Jimi Hendrix, and the 2i’s Coffee Shop bar on Old Compton Street was credited as the birthplace of UK rock ’n’ roll a decade earlier. Even the clean-living Cliff Richard may have been partial to the odd tipple there back in the day, the old devil.

• And I mustn't forget the famous Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club on Frith Street, which hosted the inaugural performance of The Who’s rock musical, Tommy, as well as what turned out to be Jimi Hendrix’s final live performance before his tragic overdose.

So much modern cultural history packed into such a small area of London! Not only that, but the streets and shops of Soho have been - and continue to be - hugely influential in setting trends in areas such as gay culture and alternative fashion. It's simply the place to be - at any time of day or night - if you're looking to be someone, or meet someone, in the world of the creative arts.

Alternative fashion in Soho

But it doesn’t stop there. The walk takes us past the former residences of many other important historical figures. Karl Marx lived in poverty on Greek Street, latterly in a dingy upstairs flat where the Quo Vadis restaurant now stands, while he was working on seminal works such as Das Kapital - until his wife came into a fortuitous inheritance, at which point Karl rapidly abandoned his communist principles by relocating west to a nicer part of town. This reminds me that I once studied Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto as part of my German degree. As the UK government now wants to ban the teaching of any “non-capitalist” systems, does this mean my course would have been illegal today? As you can tell, teaching of this type was indeed highly dangerous, making me think twice (or maybe even three times) before working at a Big 4 accounting firm for 33 years.

Nothing to do with John Logie Baird at all

There’s also an amusing story about inventor John Logie Baird, who moved to a flat on Frith Street above what is now Bar Italia, after his experiments caused an explosion in his previous accommodation. After being forced to bribe an office boy to take part in what became the first televised broadcast ever, Logie was interrupted by the complaints of some local prostitutes (who thought he was spying on them with his camera). I realise this sounds implausible, but a similar thing happened to me once on a street corner at the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, when, by chance, I encountered one of my clients (yes, really!) and started introducing her to Jayne and our visiting friends. (Just to clarify, I don’t mean I re-invented television at that moment, but that the professional ladies of the locality complained - very forcibly - that I was disturbing their nightly custom).

Dr Snow's water pump

Fortunately, and because this walk is at risk of outstaying its welcome, I have no amusing stories about other erstwhile residents of Soho, which included composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (as a child prodigy) and Richard Wagner, painter John Constable, literary critic and diarist William Hazlitt (who gave his name to Hazlitts, a famously discreet hotel on Frith Street) and poet and artist William Blake (on the site of whose birthplace the hideous William Blake tower block now stands - what a legacy!). In these times of Covid, however, the story of Dr John Snow and the Great Plague is worth re-telling. Snow was the foremost doctor of his day - indeed Millar tells us, as recently as 2003, he was voted “greatest doctor of all time” by a Hospital Doctor magazine poll. His place in Hippocratic legend was assured as he became the first to make the connection between infected water supplies and cholera, a disease believed to have accounted for the deaths of over 50,000 Londoners in the 19th century. A key point - also well covered in the most recent TV series of Victoria - is that he had to battle hard against established medical opinion that cholera was an airborne disease - much like coronavirus - but eventually persuaded the authorities to disconnect the handle of a communal water pump in Broadwick Street, Soho. The cases of sickness decreased straight away. Today, his work in saving thousands more lives is commemorated by a replica of the pump (inaugurated in 2018) and, in more time-honoured fashion, by a popular pub bearing his name.

David Bowie's plaque at Trident Studios, Soho

With that edifying tale, our walk soon comes to its end. Eschewing the many Soho haunts of the rich and famous, we repair to Bill’s Restaurant & Bar on Brewer Street. Like many eateries on our route, they have decided to extend the “eat out to help out” initiative into September off their own bat. This means we enjoy a delicious two-course lunch with two Harvey’s lagers and a glass of Pinot Grigio for a touch under £50, including service. Not surprisingly, this results in us feeling considerably less melancholy than when we started out earlier this morning. It’s also pleasing to see a decent number of people going about their daily business in this part of town - in marked contrast to the scene of desolation we witnessed earlier at Covent Garden. It may not be much but, at this moment in history, we are happy to take any normality we can get.

Acknowledgements: Jayne and Richard were following the “Covent Garden & St Giles Walk” from Volume 2 and “Soho Walk” from Volume 1 of “London’s Hidden Walks” by Stephen Millar, published by Metro Publications, 2014. Photography by Jayne Burton.