Daniel Snowman
“Not bloody likely!” The Marketing of Covent Garden, 1600-2000
Summary
The Covent Garden piazza was the first great square in London, its perimeters decorated by a string of Italianate buildings. Over the four centuries since the piazza’s creation much was to change as the sights, sounds, and skills on show shifted with the times. One theatre after another burned down only to be redesigned and rebuilt, while today’s market would be unrecognisable to earlier habitués from Pepys and Dr Johnson to Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle. Yet the Covent Garden piazza continues to thrive: a state of grace which would surely have seemed (to Eliza at least) “not bloody likely.”
Daniel Snowman
Daniel Snowman is a social and cultural historian. Born in London to a Jewish family in 1938 and educated at Cambridge and Cornell, Daniel became a lecturer at the University of Sussex and went on to work for many years at the BBC as senior producer of radio features and documentaries. A senior research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research (University of London), his many books include a social history of opera and a study of the cultural impact of the ‘Hitler Emigrés’ and, most recently, his memoir “Just Passing Through: Interactions with the World 1938-2021”.