Covent Garden Station

Covent Garden is one of London’s most layered places, and the name itself grew out of “the garden of the Abbey and Convent,” the walled-off land the Abbot of Westminster Abbey was using for orchards and arable fields by 1200. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Edward VI granted the area in 1552 to John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford, and his family turned it into a fashionable square where Inigo Jones designed the Italianate arcades and St Paul’s Church. By 1654, a fruit-and-vegetable market had appeared on the south side of the square, and over the next centuries taverns, theatres, coffee houses, and brothels gave the district a far rougher reputation. The market later became one of London’s best-known attractions, and the Royal Opera House nearby still carries the Covent Garden name. …

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