Laborless London: Comic Form and the Space of the Town in Caroline Covent Garden

Richard Brome's 1632 comedy The Weeding of Covent Garden opens with one of the early modern stage's most densely layered descriptions of a city scene. The play begins with Cockbrain, a neighborhood constable, and Rooksbill, a wealthy builder, looking out over a half-finished construction site and introducing the audience to the shape and significance of a piazza-to-be:

COCKBRAIN. Marry Sir! This is something like! These appear like Buildings! Here's Architecture exprest indeed! It is a most sightly scituation, and fit for Gentry and Nobility.

COCKBRAIN. It will all come again with large increase . . . You cannot think how I am taken with that Rowe! How even and straight they are! And so are all indeed. The Surveyor (what e're he was) has manifested himself the Master of his great Art. How he has wedded strength to beauty; state to uniformity; commodiousnesse with perspicuity! All, all as't should be!

(1.1, pp. 1–2).¹

Between Rooksbill's nervous musings and Cockbrain's effusive description, an architectural and ideological comedy ends before The Weeding of Covent Garden even really begins. Under the precise eye of a Master Surveyor, strength, state, and commodiousness are "wedded" in a triple marriage to beauty, uniformity, and perspicuity: "all" is "as't should be" in a Covent Garden devoid of conflict. Using this happy marriage as an opportunity to reflect on the social, economic, and political potential of the piazza, Cockbrain predicts that the neighborhood will fill with the cream of London society, that the vast sum of money temporarily locked up in the illiquid form of "walls and windows" will regenerate itself and increase, and that the "great works" of Rooksbill and his fellow builder-financiers will transform London into a city that rivals Venice, the capital of Mediterranean commerce.

In order to understand how Covent Garden the historical space might have been able to bear the weight of Cockbrain's overdetermined version of Covent Garden the comic space, it is necessary to look in some detail at the history of the land's development and at the politics of urban expansion in early modern London.² But before I do so, I wish to stress two points that suggest the broader significance of what will be a rather localized discussion. First, as a radically new kind of space in London, Caroline Covent Garden offers an ideal site from which to think through the emergence of the link between social and topographical distinction in the nascent metropolis. By the eighteenth century, the divisions between good and bad London neighborhoods would be completely commonsense, as city sites and class status entered into the mutually reinforcing dialectic that we still know today. This relationship was only beginning to be forged in the 1630s. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the city's neighborhoods tended to be organized around the structures of parish or ward and the convenience of commercial associations. Though there were, of course, inconsistencies within the larger pattern, for the most part fishmongers lived near other fishmongers, goldsmiths near goldsmiths, shoemakers near shoemakers.³ By the 1630s, however, as more and more of the rural gentry were drawn to the markets and entertainments of the city, and as successful citizens and merchants began to lease out their homes and shops to escape the crowded medieval streets and alleys within London's walls, a new kind of urban scene became possible. The building of the Covent Garden piazza signalled the consolidation of the city's first neighborhood based on wealth.

The emergence of this new kind of urban space was not a unitary or self- enclosed event. As Cockbrain's introductory vision begins to suggest, a diverse network of social, economic, and political forces contributed to the historical processes that led to the building of the piazza. In order to account for this multiplicity, I'll examine the ways in which this early, deeply contested, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at civic engineering took place: in legal forms, such as the Privy Council orders and building...