London, and The Comyn Ching Triangle, Part 1

       Back to London for a couple of nights this week and the RIBA TAG Summer Party.  It was a busy day; the Zurbaran exhibition at the National Gallery in the morning; lunch with a friend in the excellent Fromagerie in Lamb's Conduit St; a visit to St Pancras New Church; dinner at that perennial favourite Caio Bella; and finally the party and afterwards the pub (The Queens Larder, Queen Square).  I didn't get back to my hotel 'til nearly eleven.

     That morning, on the way to the National Gallery, I paid a return visit to The Comyn Ching Triangle.  The redevelopment of the site is an early and, I think, highly successful project by the English architect Sir Terry Farrell (1938-2025).  Before things went a bit wrong.  As an example of urbanism, and the burgeoning Post Modernist style it is fascinating.

     The triangle is bounded by Monmouth St to the nw, Mercer St to the e, and to the south by Shelton St.  (Does Shelton St follow the bed of a lost London river?)  It forms part of the area called 'Seven Dials'; a development of the 1690s of what was then known as 'Cock and Pie Fields'.  The developer was Thomas Neale.  Almost uniquely in Britain, it uses a Baroque urban form known in France as an 'Etoile' , or star, with streets radiating from a central point.  The Point du Vue is in this particular etoile is a Doric column, an accurate replacement (of the 1980s) for the lost original.
     The subsequent history of the site is bound to Covent Garden, London's wholesale fruit and veg market, to the s.  As the market waxed in size and importance warehouses were erected in the streets to the north, slowly spreading up the slope from the market to Longacre and tumbling down the other side, spreading intermittently along Neal St almost as far as Shaftesbury Avenue. Shelton St to the east of the triangle towards Neal St. still gives a good example of how atmospheric and forbidding this area could be - the street like a deep ravine between tall and austere classical brick facades; a place of almost permanent shadow.  North of the market the demographic became increasingly working class; in some parts of Seven Dials north of the triangle there were slums.

      That said, I think that whole area of Covent Garden before the closing of the Market in 1974 must have been immensely fascinating and evocative - the chaos of the market; the theatres, and the Royal Opera House; the Gentlemen's clubs, such as the Garrick; the classy restaurants and the greasy spoons, the myriad of pubs; and the artisans in small workshops serving the market and the theatres.  All of this just rubbing along.  The BBC documentary of 1972 'How does your Garden Grow?' described it as 'the home of the most urbanised working class in the world - the Covent Garden Londoner'.

     But it couldn't carry on.  The market, sadly, had to go.  The first official official proposal to move the market was made in 1914.  In the 1940s, during WWII, two grandiose schemes were made for the area (and the rest of London); firstly there was the Royal Academy London plan of 1942; and then there was the Abercrombie plan of 1945, which sort of became official government policy. Both plans were high-handed, almost megalomaniac in their scope and ambition, requiring the wholesale demolition of much of the city.  The Abercrombie plan, for instance, required the total segregation of pedestrian and traffic (we have encountered this before at St Cuthbert's Village, Gateshead).  Vast swathes of the Covent Garden area were therefore to be sacrificed for an urban motorway and a housing scheme rather like the Barbican/London Wall.  Finally, when in the early seventies a new market was erected at Nine Elms in s London, the whole area became open to re-development.

     That wholescale re-development did not occur.  It is a long, and possibly complicated story, but it was defeated by a combination of factors: increasing public dissatisfaction with the Post-War architectural settlement, strong local opposition and an increasingly focal, if not forceful, conservation movement.  The defeat of the then status quo at Covent Garden completed changed government policy.  The Abercrombie plan was suspended, with plans for the decking of Oxford St and the wholesale demotion of Whitehall scrapped.  The conservationists had won and the Modern Movement was in tatters. 

Further reading/viewing

Simon Jenkins: Concrete bungle: how public fury stopped the 1970s plan to turn London into a motorway | Planning policy | The Guardian

Terry Farrell, Academy Editions, 1993

Terry Farrell Selected and Curent Works, University of Michigan,