Covent Garden: a people's history

"Covent Garden began as luxury housing for London's seventeenth-century elite. But the arrival of a street market and nearby Drury Lane Theatre gradually transformed it into a notorious pleasure district, packed with pubs, coffee-houses, gambling dens and brothels. Lee Jackson traces its four-hundred-year history in full, from opulent Georgian shops and its role in the origins of "theatreland", to its rowdy Restoration taverns and "swinging sixties" nightclubs. This is an intimate portrait of one of London's most famous districts and its ever-changing inhabitants"--