Covent Garden Market

Daily life in the 19th century

By Nigel T Espey

Not only is the ”Garden” a bustle of activity, but the buyers and sellers stream to and from it in all directions -Henry Mayhew (London Labour and the London Poor) 

For as long as it lasted, life in Covent Garden’s market was known for being disorderly. The buildings were in bad shape and what space they did not occupy was overcome with stalls, donkeys, carts, and peddlers. There were only a handful of passageways leading into the piazza, some of them no more than the space between two buildings; people had to cart their goods through these narrow passages. Inevitably, the bottle-necks this created often led to fights between vendors battling for their right of way.

This is not to say the congestion stopped it from being a successful market. It supplied all manner of fruits and vegetables, most of it homegrown but with an increasing amount arriving from overseas. The spring especially saw an abundance of goods, ranging from broccoli, cucumbers, French beans, onions, new potatoes, asparagus, sea kale, grapes, apples, strawberries, and spring flowers.

The abundance of products and vendors, all with differing points of view, made the methods of buying and selling needlessly complicated; a sieve equaled one bushel and a half-sieve was one peck. The largest punnet was equivalent to 5 ½ pints, and the smallest punnet was 1 ½ pints. A pottle, on the other hand, changed meanings often enough that nobody could be quite sure what it measured, and the quantities people were sure of varied by the manner in which the products were filled or heaped.

The marketplace became so chaotic that many vendors neglected to pay tolls for selling in the piazza, or in some cases refused outright to pay them. The piazza’s owner, the Earl of Bedford, took so many people to court for the non-payment of tolls that he realized there was no way he could charge people to sell goods there if it was in terrible condition. Therefore, in 1830 he had a new market built, accommodating buyer and seller alike, by dividing the market into sections categorized by the kind of goods sold there.

Though the 1830 market did improve things, chaos still prevailed in the daily life of the market. By 1890 people were complaining again as congestion in its narrow streets continued to grow year on year:

“We are fully cognizant of the fact that Spitalfields and Farringdon absorb some portion of the trade in vegetables; but Covent Garden is the market, par excellence, and it is a disgrace to the metropolis to be rely upon the capabilities of a place which, spacious as it may be, is fitted at the very utmost to serve as a market for a town of 600,000 inhabitants.” – account of an “Angry Victorian” in the City Press

Arguably, it was a charming sort of chaos. In Little Doritt, Charles Dickens describes it, with what one assumes to be nauseated affection, as “a place of past and present mystery, romance, abundance, want, beauty, ugliness, fair country gardens, and foul street gutters; all confused together.”

Characters of the Market

Like characters from a Dickens novel, many of the people that frequented Covent Garden Market were colourful individuals. Costermongers especially were the market's heartbeat. Though “costermonger” refers literally to people who bought fruits and vegetables wholesale and sold them retail, the costermongers of Covent Garden sold anything from fresh produce to silk-worms to fried eels, hawking their wares at passers by. They trundled in and out of the market in droves, very few of them actually having fixed stalls in the marketplace, and were generally assisted by aides known as barra boys (a term originating from the Cockney "barrow boy," so called for being commonly seen pushing around wheelbarrows).

Some of the more interesting people were the porters, especially the Irish basket-women, female porters in the market known for being just as strong, alcoholic and rude as their male equivalents. They were a common sight, carting loads on their backs - and heads – for considerable distances, often for customers who could not afford carts or donkeys themselves.

So impressive were they, that one such porter-woman wagered that she could carry a fat man from the market to Elephant and Castle in under twenty-five minutes. Halfway there, she was allowed to drink a glass of gin, and when the man got restless, she pacified him by threatening to throw him into the ditch. She arrived with time to spare, and was greeted by a cheering crowd that showered her with presents.

Similarly notorious were Covent Garden’s flower girls. They attracted attention to their wares by shouting at passers by in unique marketplace jargon:

“Two bundles a penny, primroses!”

“Sweet violets, penny a bunch!”

In London Labour and the London Poor, written in 1851, Henry Mayhew describes two types of flower girl. The first and most notable were the flower “waifs", typically younger girls who scraped by on their own, or sold flowers to supplement their parents’ income. They were generally “very persevering,” and persisted at the heels of anyone who passed by, hoping to sell their wares. It is this type of flower girl that inspired Eliza Doolittle’s character in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and thanks to the many incarnations of that play it is an image that has lived to become iconic today.

The second type of flower girl was less common, and they doubled as prostitutes, generally staying out later than their contemporaries to sell a different kind of flower when night fell. They came to form a seedier reputation for the flower-vending business, and at the time “flower-seller” was a popularly-known moniker for “prostitute.”