Covent Garden

 

A Proper Good Afternoon to You

It was a nice, cool Sunday Morning. I have been touristing pretty hard, so I wanted to give myself an easy day. A stroll around Covent Garden seemed to fit the bill, and I wouldn't even have to take the tube.

Yeah, right. You just wanted an excuse to visit Neal Yard's Dairy,

You're on to me, but first I did something touristy by visiting the London Transport Museum. It's not huge, but the exhibits are fun and educational. Some are interactive.  The museum covers the first horse drawn busses and trams, city railroads, and the construction of the London Underground.

This is the ground floor, but there are more goodies upstairs. A visitor can climb in and sit in some of them.

Covent Garden is a big tourist draw on weekends with plenty of places to eat and drink and opportunities for luxury retain therapy. Apart from the Piazza, many of the streets are pedestrianized and have interesting shops to entice the throngs of visitors.  I confess to being tempted by the chocolate.

The name comes from the fact that this was once the site of a convent with its attendant garden. Ironically once the area was acquired by the Earl of Bedford, despite his plans to make the area a posh residential area and market, it soon became a hot bed of vice.  Disreputable clubs found a home there as well as a distressing number of prostitutes serving the after theatre crowd.

Let us leave such unpleasant associations behind as we repair to Shorts Gardens and the Neal Yard's Dairy. The charming young man who helped me was very generous with samples, and I came away with some goat cheese and cheddar. I paid plenty for it, too.

But I can't have it yet. I'm down stairs because my room is due to be cleaned. But I have my lap top and can watch the Tour.

Cheerio!