previous | next

(One has only to go to the English National Opera to see just how entrenched is the preoccupation of the anglo-saxon mind with such scenes; barely a production that does not have a" swirl and bustle" market scene; it is how we like to think Italians and Spaniards behave; basically, in fact, it is a rather unmetropolitan vision; in real cities the crowd swarm straight ahead down straight roads: the crowds of Oxford Street of Nathan Road in Hong Kong: no swirl, no bustle; they are Crowd.)

Since the eighties I would say Covent Garden is, almost miraculously becoming 'authentic' again. The street performers are more vulgar, the shops tackier, "Mr Punch" seems to be on the way out. Last Christmas I saw a bald, moustachioed man smoking a pipe and dressed in a frilly pink tutu being hoisted in a spotlight to a height of 100feet by an HGV crane to touch the Christmas Tree and bring it blazing into light with a touch of his tiny wand. Young black boys boys ride their wierd little bikes round the market; sitting at a cafe table I watched helmeted construction workers high on the scaffolding of the new Royal Opera House frugging to a punkish band outside the Transport Museum.

A return to authenticity? Well at least one of many fluctuations in Covent Garden in the last three hundred and fifty years. The real history.

Mind you there are things which are indisputably undeniably inauthentic. One of the most offensive sights in London are the gemutlich little figures that totter out to ring the hour on bells with irritating little hammers, attached to the corner of the unashamedly sixties Swiss Centre. In a Swiss village this would be (I suppose) cute; bolted to a modern building in Zurich it would be just corny, but we'd put up with it. But that this object should be stuck on the outside of a modern building in downtown London is intolerable. A friend and I have considered an attack on this object. Flame throwers perhaps? A small bomb?

previous | next