This Month’s Magazine
Street features
Every Covent Garden Street has its own history, some more desirable than others.
Please select street below and meet some of Covent Garden’s characters over the years.
- Please choose a street from the below -
Long Acre
Long before Covent Garden became the pancultural destination it is today, there was a humble track running through the farmsteads of London connecting the Roman City of Londinium to Westminster whereupon bucolic farmers would lead their livestock through a pastoral idyll. First recognised as a thoroughfare during the reign of King John (1199-1256) Long Acre has borne witness to more quirks of history than any other, for 30 generations Long Acre has been an important central route for Covent Garden. Where today you see taxis, tourists and tradesmen, in our (27 Greats)-Grandfathers’ time in their place would have been donkeys, druids and dunghills.
In the 1640s Long Acre was a very salubrious street, home to some of London’s most influential people. Oliver Cromwell had residence here as did the sculptor Nicholas Stone and poet John Dryden, Thomas Chippendale also had a workshop on the street. Amongst the homes of the rich and famous were victuallers and coffee houses wherein persons of real quality would debate the issues of the day. Over the course of the seventeenth century and the flourishing of the fruit, vegetable and flower market to the South, the properties of Long Acre became inextricably linked to industries associated with market trade. Wainwrights dominated the street for the next two centuries and tanners, cabinetmakers, upholsterers and metalworkers joined them to create Britain’s foremost centre of coachmaking. A feature of much of the historic architecture of the street was a predominance of high arches which facilitated the coachmakers in wheeling out their wares. In his diaries, Samuel Pepys tells of the occasion he spent £53 on his own coach. Pepys was no stranger to idling and spent five hours on Long Acre watching a junior craftsman painting his coach yellow. And thus Long Acre continued for centuries, supplying private vehicles for a hungry public, changing with the times to keep up with the cutting edge of manufacturing. By the turn of the last century London’s thoroughfares had changed; motorcars had replaced horsepower and likewise Long Acre was now home to the automobile trade. London’s fire engines were made by the Merryweather factory at 63 Long Acre for 213 years, the last fire engine rolled off the Long Acre production line in the 1950s. British Mercedes were based here as were Fiat and Daimler and, with the advances in transport, even Louis Bleriot’s aircraft company had premises here.
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The Odham brothers were to bring about the next revolution for Long Acre with their printing presses. After an inauspicious start to trading the brothers were in financial trouble so decided to gamble all or nothing to try and rescue their business. With a last throw of the dice they made their office boy, one Julius Salter Elias the manager of the firm and slowly but surely the gamble paid off. Odhams Press flourished under the astute acumen of Elias and within 20 years the firm owned almost half the properties on Long Acre publishing some of the most popular titles of the early 1900s: Vanity Fair, Good Housekeeping, Ideal Home, Sporting Life and The Herald which was the forerunner for the UK’s highest-selling tabloid The Sun.
Long Acre Now
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These days Long Acre has departed from the transport realm and is home to a healthy mixture of shops and businesses. Marks & Spencer dominates opposite the station while many other flagship stores also exert their presence here: Timberland, Swatch, H&M and Esprit all have premises.
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There are also some impressive independent shops such as Elliot Rhodes. The London Marathon Store is currently helping those hardy souls who are in training for the big day.
Behind the scenes there are a number of innovative companies with offices on Long Acre: At Thomas International, businesses can learn how to maximise the potential of members of staff with sophisticated profiling techniques and FH Creative lead the way in creative design solutions. Times change and with them Long Acre changes who knows what the next epoch-making development will be? Whatever it may be, we have certainly come a long way since the donkeys, druids and dunghills.
The first TV broadcast
30 September 1929 was an auspicious day for modern civilisation: John Logie Baird broadcast the first ever television programme from his headquarters on Long Acre. British programming has advanced in 77 years with plasma screens, red buttons, internet streaming and whatnot but without Logie Baird’s pioneering discoveries we couldn’t watch the news, gawp at reality TV contestants or see England beat allcomers at sport. The first programme was transmitted over shortwave radio and was a crude and jerky series of images set to speech, there was only one wavelength so the transmission was alternately speech and television.
The Times of the following morning saw fit only to publish news of this breakthrough on page 26 telling us that the broadcast was successfully received by two special television receivers in Savoy Hill and Olympia while “the ordinary listener, not equipped with a televisor, was able to receive the broadcast speeches but during the television part of the transmission... heard a raucous howl.”
Exactly what the programme was seems to have been lost to history but we do know it lasted for 30 minutes just before midday and featured scientists eulogising Logie Baird for his pioneering invention. The Times also notes with some satisfaction that the first transmitted television images were in negative due to a technical hitch. Within a few years the invention had been refined and now homes across the world would be lost without their televisors.
