Covent Garden Community Association: Complete Annual Report 2000 2001

Covent Garden London

The heart of London's West End

Covent Garden Community Association 30 Years On

The theatres in Covent Garden were initially amazed in the early 1970s by the GLC's proposal to blitz the area for a claimed urban Utopia. The planners trotted out gobbledegook words and where I lived, in Earlham Street, was to be the Seven Dials 'Node'. Initially there was a feeling of helplessness as these were official 'government' schemes. However, amazement rapidly turned to outrage and we banded together to support the fledgling CGCA.

Our then family business had two theatres in the Covent Garden area: the New Theatre (now the Albery), and Wyndham's Theatre. Both of them would have been demolished by this new 'masterplan'. At the time, the Wyndham was showing the musical Godspell with artists such as David Essex and Jeremy Irons. To help put the penniless CGCA on a sounder footing, the artists and staff all volunteered to give a Sunday benefit performance to help raise some money for them. We raised about £1,200, which in those days was a substantial sum.

Casualties of the eventual redevelopment schemes were our Donmar technical equipment hire and sales businesses in both Earlham Street and Shorts Gardens. However, the Donmar Warehouse Theatre that I constructed out of our former rehearsal premises for the RSC, and later managed, still survives.

In Covent Garden the battle was primarily against planners and bureaucrats. But our Criterion theatre in Piccadilly Circus was soon on another battlefront when the Crown Commissioners and private developers tried to destroy it so they could build 400-foot office towers around Piccadilly Circus. Their attempts were even more aggressive and uncaring towards the survival of either the theatres or the local residents. Again the CGCA came to our help, and the success of the Soho Society and the Save Piccadilly Campaign in rescuing Piccadilly Circus owes a great deal to the CGCA's support.

Ian Albery

Chief Executive and Producer

Sadler's Wells and Peacock Theatres

Covent Garden Community Association Annual Report 2000-2001

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