Granite Tuscan colonnades and glazed iron roofs on the 1830 market hall in the piazza, and the Henrietta Street front Hitchcock used in Frenzy.
What Covent Garden looks like
The market building fills the middle of the piazza, three long ranges of shops with a grey granite Tuscan colonnade along the north and south fronts under a stone balustrade. Iron and glass roofs cover the ground between the ranges, and under one of them the floor is sunk a storey below the terrace with cafe tables on it. Stone setts run across the square outside.
St Paul's faces the square from the west side, its portico two columns and two square piers under a deep pediment with a clock in it. The doorway in the middle is a false one with the altar behind that wall. The way in is from Bedford Street.
Around the square the streets are narrow and the fronts are brick and stucco, four and five storeys with shops at ground level. The takes up one side of behind a Corinthian portico, and the Theatre Royal stands round the corner on Catherine Street behind a colonnaded entrance under a first floor terrace. The station front at James Street and Long Acre is oxblood terracotta with two Underground roundels on it.
North of Long Acre seven streets meet at a stone column with six sundials on it, and the shopfronts around it are narrow on triangular plots. Mercer Street runs off the junction on setts between a blank rendered wall and yellow brick warehouse fronts. Neal's Yard is a small court off Monmouth Street with orange and blue window frames and festoon lights strung across it.
Shot in Covent Garden
Hitchcock shot Frenzy in the working fruit and vegetable market in July 1971. The market has since moved out to Nine Elms and those scenes cannot be repeated, though the buildings he used around the piazza still stand at 3 and 37 Bow Street.
Frenzy, 1972
Robert Rusk takes Babs up to his flat at 3 Henrietta Street. The camera follows them to the door, then backs down the staircase on its own and out into the street while the murder happens off screen. The interior was a studio set at Pinewood and the cut is hidden behind a porter who crosses the front of the lens with a sack of potatoes. The building is a bar and restaurant now.
Frenzy, 1972
The pub at 37 Bow Street
Richard Blaney is sacked from the bar here by the landlord Felix Forsythe, played by Bernard Cribbins. It was the Globe in 1971 and it trades as the Bow Street Tavern now.
What Covent Garden can double for
Quincy Market in Boston, Massachusetts
Quincy Market is a two storey granite hall of 1824 to 1826 with a four column Doric portico at each end, its columns cut in one piece like the granite monoliths of the colonnade on the piazza here. Boston sets them across the two ends and London runs them along the north and south fronts. Both halls hold shops and cafes today. A dome and a double height rotunda stand over the middle of Quincy Market and nothing here matches them, so a full length view along the front gives the swap away. The brick ranges either side of it run four and a half storeys across wide granite paved streets, where the hall here stands inside a closed square. Try searching granite market hall colonnade now.
Temple Bar's lanes are narrow and cobbled, with three and four storey brick and rendered fronts over pubs and small theatres. That is close to the scale of Earlham Street and Mercer Street, where the buildings meet the pavement directly and the roadway is setts rather than asphalt. Temple Bar opens onto the Liffey quays along its north edge, so keep a wide shot inside the lanes and away from the piazza. Dublin's painted pub fronts and its fanlights over Georgian doorcases would both need matching on any dressed frontage. Try searching narrow cobbled lanes now.
Place des Vosges in Paris, France
Red brick over stone arcades runs round all four sides of the Place des Vosges, the arches set on square pillars under steep slate roofs with dormers. The north side of the piazza here has the same combination, a portico walk of eight arches under two storeys of red brick with stone dressings, an attic above the cornice and a slated roof with tall oval dormers. Only the north side of the piazza holds that comparison. The Paris square runs 140 metres each way around a garden, and the market hall standing in the middle here fills the view from every other angle. Try searching red brick arcades now.
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