Covent Garden sits on land that has hosted traders since the seventh century, when Anglo-Saxons built their settlement of Lundenwic here rather than reoccupying the abandoned Roman city to the east. The name itself tells a simpler story: this was literally a garden where Westminster Abbey's monks grew vegetables for their convent until Henry VIII seized the land in the 1530s.

The transformation from monastic cabbage patch to London's first formal square came in the 1630s when Inigo Jones designed his Italianate piazza for the Earl of Bedford. Within decades, the aristocratic vision had given way to something earthier.

By the 1700s, Covent Garden had become London's most notorious red-light district, where Jack Harris's Shakespeare Tavern published an annual catalogue listing hundreds of local prostitutes with their prices, physical attributes and specialities. The Bow Street Runners, London's first professional police force, set up shop here specifically to clean up the chaos.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours reveal how this single square captures London's entire social history, from the gas lamps that still burn today to the hidden alleyways where bare-knuckle boxing matches earned one pub the nickname "Bucket of Blood."