Covent Garden Piazza & St Paul's, the Actors' Church
Why is it significant?
Stand in the open square and face the great columned portico of St Paul's Church on its western side. You are in London's first planned public square, laid out in the 1630s by Inigo Jones for the Earl of Bedford, and inspired by the arcaded piazzas Jones had seen in Italy.
Key Facts
| Place | Covent Garden Piazza & St Paul's, the Actors' Church |
|---|---|
| Address | Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ED, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51170, -0.12390 |
| Part of Walk | Curtain Up: London's West End Theatreland, from the Savoy to Covent Garden and Leicester Square |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in the open square and face the great columned portico of St Paul's Church on its western side. You are in London's first planned public square, laid out in the 1630s by Inigo Jones for the Earl of Bedford, and inspired by the arcaded piazzas Jones had seen in Italy. Street performers have been drawing crowds on these cobbles for centuries.
The name is older than the square. This was the convent garden, the kitchen garden of the monks of Westminster Abbey, until Henry VIII took it and it passed to the Russell family, the Earls of Bedford. The story goes that the earl asked Jones for a cheap church, saying something not much better than a barn would do, and Jones replied that he would have the handsomest barn in England. And here is the joke of that portico the door inside it is a fake. The altar is on this side, so the real entrance is at the back, through the quiet churchyard garden off Bedford Street.
On 9 May 1662 Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he had watched an Italian puppet play here, under the portico. It is the first recorded performance in England of the puppet who became Mr Punch, and every May puppeteers still gather to celebrate his birthday. Two and a half centuries later, George Bernard Shaw set the opening of Pygmalion right here, with Eliza Doolittle selling flowers to theatregoers sheltering from the rain, the scene that later became My Fair Lady.
For three hundred years this square was London's great fruit, vegetable and flower market, until the traders moved out to Nine Elms in 1974. Inside the church, they call it the Actors' Church. Its walls are lined with memorials to performers, Charlie Chaplin, Vivien Leigh and Boris Karloff among them, and the ashes of the great Victorian actress Ellen Terry rest there in a casket.
So the actors' parish church sits right in the middle of the square where English street theatre was born. Now cross the piazza to its north-east corner, where the iron and glass of the opera house's Floral Hall rise above the arcade, and go round onto Bow Street.