A street performer on top of a tall stand, with the crowd sitting round on the piazza.
Covent Garden is really cool. It used to be London’s commercial fruit and vegetable market, they moved the commercial market out to a big modern building in Vauxhall and repurposed Covent Garden for posh shops, a small street market, cafes/bars and street theatre.
So generally speaking you want to steer clear of the posh shops, which are pretty much all overpriced and touristy. The small covered market (Jubilee Market, on the south side of the piazza) changes by day: antiques and collectables on Mondays, mostly tourist-tat from Tuesday to Friday, and arts and crafts at weekends. If you have a 12-year-old then send them to potter around it for a while, they might find some of the stalls suitably edgy. But the main thing that you want to see at Covent Garden are the street performers (busking). Covent Garden is the best location in the UK - possibly Europe and maybe even the world - for street theatre.
There’s a bunch of different sites:
- There’s a series of small pitches on the road from Covent Garden tube station to the market itself: these are mostly individual buskers, mimes, ‘living statues’ (how hard can it be to spray-paint yourself and stand still? Don’t give them money, it only encourages them) and sometimes magicians.
- Then there’s the North Hall (a covered, seated pitch in the corner of the market building, over towards the Royal Opera House side), which is mainly for variety and circus acts such as jugglers and ventriloquists, with a few acoustic musicians and singers.
- And there’s an indoor site (downstairs in the main Covent Garden building, in the Lower Courtyard), which is for classical performers: opera singers and classical musicians such as string quartets.
- But the main site is the West Piazza, in front of St Paul’s Church at the south-west end of Covent Garden, in between the ends of King St and Henrietta St.
The main site has what are called “circle shows”, which is where, instead of people just watching the performer for a minute or two as they walk past, the performer spends some time gathering a crowd - which sits down to watch - and then the performer puts on a show while the audience stays sitting/standing around them in a big circle.
The other performers (the Covent Garden Street Performers Association) vet the acts on the main site, so they’re mostly pretty good, and sometimes you get to see someone really excellent. Felicity Footloose is one of our favourites, her show is so entertaining and her character is so likeable that it would be difficult not to have a good time!
So the kinds of things you might see in these shows are usually a combination of comedy, circus skills and old-time ‘variety’ acts. Juggling, dancing, gymnastic, unicycling, jokes, escapology, all kinds of things. There’s usually a strong element of audience participation - generally the performer and the audience are all pretty supportive of audience-members who choose to get up and join in - and it definitely adds to the fun.
These shows are free, but (as the performers will be sure to tell you as part of the show) they do this for a living, so they do need your donations (tips) in order to keep doing it. Obviously they’d like you to donate as much as possible, but (in my opinion) you don’t need to feel guilty if you’ve left at least £1 per person - since there are normally a few hundred people in the audience, and each show lasts around 30 minutes, that seems pretty fair to me. But anyway, if you choose not to donate then no-one there will try to force you to (no-one will even notice whether you did or not).
Some of the acts do have an element of danger - or at least, they make it appear that they do - so you want to make sure to keep young children under control, and don’t let them run into the performer’s area when the performer is juggling fire/chainsaws/knives or whatever.
The weekends are the best time to go as there’s pretty much continuous shows throughout most of Saturday and Sunday.
Covent Garden is very close to Leicester Square, so (depending which tube line you come on) it might be easier to get out of the tube at Leicester Square and walk to Covent Garden, instead of changing trains and going just one stop on the Piccadilly Line. Covent Garden station is pretty small and only has lifts (elevators), not escalators, so if it gets too busy then they have to shut it - sometimes it’s exit-only.
Combining with other activities:
- As already noted, Covent Garden is near Leicester Square. There’s loads of stuff to do there and in neighbouring Soho (seedy) and Chinatown (foody).
- There’s also lots of shopping streets nearby.
- The Royal Opera House is right on Covent Garden.
- The London Transport Museum (great for kids) is also right on Covent Garden.
- Loads of restaurants (although a bit expensive).
- Covent Garden is in the middle of ‘theatreland’, i.e. the bit of London with lots of theatres in it. So if you’re going to the theatre in the evening, then Covent Garden would be a good place to spend the late afternoon and get an early dinner.
Two violinists busking in Covent Garden.
A street entertainer with spiked hair, performing in the rain.
Covent Garden is really pretty at Christmas!
Giant mistletoe, silver bows and mirror balls under the market’s glass roof.
Crowds round the Christmas tree on the piazza.
