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Location Information:
Covent
Garden is a district in London,
England, located in the easternmost
parts of the City of Westminster and
the southwestern corner of the
London Borough of Camden. The area
is dominated by shopping, street
performers, and entertainment
facilities, and it contains an
entrance to the Royal Opera House,
which is also widely-known simply as
"Covent Garden", and the bustling
Seven Dials area.
The
area is bounded by High Holborn to
the north, Kingsway to the east, the
Strand to the south and Charing
Cross Road to the west. Covent
Garden Piazza is located in the
geographical centre of the area and
was the site of a flower, fruit and
vegetable market from the 1500s
until 1974, when the wholesale
market relocated to New Covent
Garden Market in Nine Elms. Nearby
areas include Soho, St James's,
Bloomsbury, and Holborn.
The
marketplace and Royal Opera House
were memorably brought together in
the opening of George Bernard Shaw's
play, Pygmalion, as well its musical
adaptation by Alan Jay Lerner, My
Fair Lady. In both, Professor Henry
Higgins is waiting for a cab to take
him home from the opera when he
comes across Eliza Doolittle selling
flowers in the market.
In the
mid-1950s, before he directed such
films as If.... and O Lucky Man!,
Lindsay Anderson directed a short
film about the daily activities of
the Covent Garden market called
Every Day Except Christmas. It shows
12 hours in the life of the market
and market people, now long gone
from the area, but it also reflects
three centuries of tradition in the
operation of the daily fruit and
vegetable market.
Alfred
Hitchcock's 1972 film, Frenzy,
likewise takes place amongst the
pubs and fruit markets of Covent
Garden. The serial sex killer in
Frenzy is a local fruit vendor, and
the film features several blackly
comic moments suggesting a
metaphorical correlation between the
consumption of food and the act of
rape–murder. Hitchcock was the son
of a retail greengrocer in
North-East London and would have
known the area, so the film was
partly conceived (and marketed) as a
nostalgic return to familiar streets
from the director's childhood.
Local
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