The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Peter Ackroyd's introduction and Clive Boursnell's marvellous photographs, taken over the course of numerous and extended visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s. The book includes a preface by Clive Boursnell and the words of some of the market people whom the photographer interviewed at the time.
"If you ever wondered what Jane Austen's Mr Darcy and his 'fellows' got up to on their numerous trips to London, here is the book they would certainly have carried around ... HARRIS'S LIST OF COVENT GARDEN LADIES was a bestseller of the Eighteenth Century, shifting 250,000 copoies in an age before mass consumerism. An annual 'guide book', and published at Christmas time, it detailed the names, attributes and 'specialities' of the capital's prostitutes. During its heyday (1759 -95) HARRIS'S LIST was the essential accessory for any serious gentleman of pleasure. Hallie Rubenhold has collected the funniest, rudest and most bizarre entries penned by Jack Harris, Pimp-General-of-all-England' into this mischievous little book."
Cavalry captain Gabriel Lacey returns to Regency London from the Napoleonic wars to begin solving crimes that go unnoticed by the Bow Street Runners, which take him from the mansions of Mayfair to the backstreets of London's rookeries. June 1817: Captain Lacey stops to assist a young woman in the market at Covent Garden, and realizes to his astonishment that she is his daughter. Lacey then discovers that his estranged wife and her paramour, a French officer, have journeyed to London at the invitation of James Denis to dissolve her marriage to Captain Lacey. Meanwhile, a Bow Street Runner and a man from the Thames River Police have asked Lacey to help them look into the disappearances of “game girls” from Covent Garden. The magistrates aren’t interested in their fate, but perhaps Lacey can learn a thing or two. Lacey agrees and recruits old friends to help. But when the goings-on in Covent Garden put his daughter in danger, Lacey’s crusade turns personal. He will do anything, and call in any favor from anyone, in order to protect his own Gabriella.
The New Covent Garden Food Company was founded in 1988 to make homemade quality soup using entirely natural ingredients. This enduring popularity is a result of New Covent Gardens continuous passion for fresh soup, which they expound as the ultimate, easy-to-make, healthy, delicious meal. Featuring over one hundred of the their most popular soup recipes, this kitchen classic is as appealing today as it was when it was first published ten years ago.
An extraordinary city, London grew from a backwater in the Classical Age into an important medieval city and significant Renaissance urban center to a modern colossus--full of a free people ever evolving. Roy Porter touches the pulse of his hometown and makes it our own, capturing London's fortunes, people, and imperial glory with vigor and wit. 58 photos.
‘Clive Boursnell evokes the unique atmosphere of [Covent Garden], redolent of the smell of the vegetables and the colour of the fruit but mingled with it also a sense of the larger city as a place of money and trade. They make a heady mixture . . . The life has now changed. That is the unwritten law of London. Yet the buildings survive . . . the geography, if not the appearance, has been preserved.' Peter Ackroyd, of Old Covent Garden In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Forty years later he has returned and shot those many of those same sites as they are today. This book juxtaposes old and new photographs, showing how Covent Garden has changed – and the ways in which it has remained the same.
