Covent Garden London
The heart of London's West End
Some thoughts
Thirty years ago, it was not just the Piazza that was changing; a myriad of back-street businesses had an equally supporting role. My own furniture workshop in Stukeley Street, where I have lived and worked for 20 years, was one of the many picturesque "fruit 'n veg" warehouses threatened with Barbican-style development.
A few things have conspired to keep Covent Garden hybrid and stimulating. Thanks to advances in computers and communications, small businesses can still compete in both global and local markets and do so with creative teams who actually prefer to work up and down ramshackle staircases than in corporate mausoleums with marbled atriums.
Another is the sustained pressure by the CGCA to restrain helter-skelter development for its own sake. The CGCA has undoubtedly won the moral argument over ruthless property speculation but has never had much sanction. But by continually asking awkward and, in hindsight, extraordinarily prescient questions (and occasionally mobilising the community) they have sometimes been able to delay the more unacceptable planning decisions just long enough for developers to think again and lose critical momentum. Like a bantamweight judo wrestler, the CGCA has been able to punch way above its weight and although it has frequently lost its battles, it has rarely done so without affecting changes to undesirable schemes.
Although genuine workshops are much fewer (in Thomas Chippendale's day there were more than 160 cabinet workshops in the area), there are a surprising number of specialist businesses that have survived (Arthur Beal, and Fred Collins, for instance). Some, like the Punjab Restaurant, have even passed their half-century - a touching vignette that an Indian Restaurant opened shortly after Partition should be amongst the longest surviving businesses in a quintessentially English part of London.
Luke Hughes
(opened a furniture design workshop in Drury Lane in 1981; still living there with his business still operating next door)
Covent Garden Community Association Annual Report 2000-2001
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