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That is the simple story. In fact it is more complicated than that, both historically and in its current development.

To begin with Covent Garden, it could be said, began as "inauthentic", designed very consciously by an Inigo Jones who imposed an Italianate vision of town planning quite alien to the muddle of London. It was an astonishing sight for the Londoners of 1640. And its promoter, the 4th Earl of Bedford was anxious for it to be, as it were, an inauthentic place, free of the loutishness of authentic, unreconstructed London, the tough Old London of cutpurses and roaring boys, the London of Elizabethan and Jacobean bourgeois comedy. He declared that the houses should be for "Persons of the greatest Distinction." Writers on Covent Garden are surprised at his readiness to permit the selling of fruit and veg where the modish rich had just moved in; no doubt he needed the money. But in doing so he promoted a typically London muddle, the kind of muddle of which we should be proud; for it is specifically London-like, this consciousness of what things should be defeated by the sheer elan of the authentic; in the history of Covent Garden the very authentic; fruit and veg in the market; S&M at the Ben Jonson's Head (William Hickey in 1768 reports "three Amazonian tigresses pummelling a young man with all their might...") street gangs, (e.g the Mohocks), Mrs Phillips sex shop which sold "all sorts of fine Machines called Cundums." She also stocked books: Crazy Tales or Female Flagellants. (If we think that's quaint then consistency requires that we feel the same about those copies of Latex Lover or Asian Babes in Ann Summers, the new 'Mrs Philips'.)

The market went its own authentic way, with occasional attempts at control. In 1748, for example, there was a move to ban the market because it was untidy, noisy, inconvenient, but it continued to flourish and become progressively more diverse and more unruly; the entire market area was regulated and redesigned by Charles Fowler in 1831. But with these changes a certain inauthenticity could be said to have prevailed.
"Fashionable Londoners" the London Encyclopaedia tells us "liked to mingle with farmers, costermongers and flower-girls." The last photos of Covent Garden market in the late sixties show the space before Inigo Jones's St Paul' Church is full of crates and lorries unloading. If this was authenticity again then we can surely say that what Covent Garden became in the eighties was decidedly inauthentic. The idea of the Italian piazza much loved of London ciabatta eaters, just as it it had been in three hundred and fifty years before, again came to the fore. It was to be "continental"; it was to be a place for the theatre of life, the swirl and bustle of street life.

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