WC2 is the land of Covent Garden and Holborn. An area where business and pleasure readily co-exist, this postcode seems to be filled both with venerable institutions and the thronging tourist hordes. Housing here is scattered, piecemeal and pricey...

Area Description
To write a comprehensive guide to WC2 would take far too long. It contains two of the world's most famous open spaces in Leicester and Trafalgar Squares, the former now hosting national film premieres and the latter the scene of everything from political furores down the ages to the mad jamboree of New Year's Eve every year (driving the police quite mad). Half of Chinatown is also in WC2, with all the food emporia that that implies. The recently listed Centre Point Tower at St. Giles' Circus, the RAF church of St. Clement Danes on the Strand, the "Queen Mary" and the "Tattershall Castle" boat pubs...the list could ramble on. And from Tin Pan Alley on Denmark Street to the luxury of the Savoy Hotel, WC2 does not bow to the influence of just one social grouping. As the saying has it, all human life is here.Housing
Housing in these parts is very scattered, easy to miss, with only the west side of Drury Lane offering any serious concentrations. Covent Garden was created as an upmarket housing scheme but proved no match to the market place. Flats overlook the church to the west and a new development has arisen on Bedford Street, but there are no houses here now, although the great success of its transformation has led to warehouse conversions in the courts and alleys that sneak around it. According to estate agents, there are only six freehold houses in the Covent Garden region, but there are a few further north, around the Seven Dials' roads of Shorts Gardens and Mercer Street.

Seven Dials, a planned creation of the 1690s, was a notorious area for almost its entire life. Dickens once persuaded a reluctant policeman to give him a guided tour here to get a full-on taste of how bad city life could be. Since its restoration in 1990, it has slipped very easily into the status of being a satellite of Covent Garden. Neal Street is filled with visitors at any time of the day and Seven Dials Court is a recent, two-tiered landscaped courtyard looking all the world like a miniature Covent Garden. Matthews Yard, off Shorts Gardens, is a 1989 development of 3 houses, 3 flats and 3 maisonettes. In 1990 15 flats were built in Fielding Court, Mercer Street has 7 flats designed by Terry Farrell and Tower Street has a Nineties warehouse conversion.

Moving east, between Seven Dials and Lincoln's Inn, are WC2's greatest amount of flats. A large number congregate at the northern end of Endell Street and Newton Street has a Barratt block of 17 flats from 1999. Macklin Street has a Victorian building split into 6 flats. There are a couple of Eighties' developments in Floral Street (alongside the ever-popular Sanctuary) but it's round the courts off Drury Lane, especially Broad Court and Martlett Court, that we have a serious concentration of flats. Just south of here there are 5-storey blocks on Tavistock Street and close by the Strand Palace Hotel has had its back annexe converted into 42 flats. Across the Strand, 66 flats have been placed in an old office building - the Little Adelphi - on John Adam Street.

At the south-western edge of the postcode, there are, off St. Martin's Lane, 12 new flats on Meridian Place and 25 new flats at Garrick House. Many derelict houses have been brought back to life on Craven Street, and just up the road 12 flats have been carved out of an old NatWest bank that allows its residents to give their address as Trafalgar Square.

To get a place here is, therefore, serious ear-to-the-ground territory. But it would be (along with Soho) the liveliest place to be.

Facilities
WC2, for all its tourist attractions, is a working part of town, and like W1, full of small offices. The stairways are frequently old and twisting and the antique lifts that accompany them have none of the state-of-the-art feel to be found in the City. Bookshops crowd around Charing Cross Road and its feeder alleys, clothes shops predominate on Long Acre, grand front-of-house offices can be seen on Kingsway and the Strand, eateries are on display on Drury Lane, St. Martin's Lane and Great Queen Street and the terminally hip Seven Dials/Covent Garden region have shops to die for, darling.

Covent Garden is, of course, the great success story of the centre of London. As a controlled market place it was a disaster, soon falling so far into the depths of vice that a special Act of Parliament was necessary to kick out everyone but the fruit & veg traders. Even then, it was hopelessly inadequate for the job, and it is a miracle it held on till 1974.

To live and work in London is to be asked the way there by a ceaseless array of temporarily lost tourists. Saved from the bulldozers its rebirth as the place to shop, be seen, hang out and watch the various street performers has led to close juxtapositions with the Transport and Theatre Museums and the complete rebuild in the Nineties of the Opera House from the bottom up.

Its success can best be gauged by how large the concept of the area has been allowed to grow. Originally bordered by Long Acre to the north, Drury Lane to the east, St. Martin's Lane to the west and the Strand to the south, it is now taken to be about twice its old size. Companies love it on their headed paper.

Holborn, the link between the City and the West End, has no such pretensions. It is a fiercely busy place, with London's busiest tube station and, in High Holborn and Kingsway, two of the city centre's loudest thoroughfares. It contains London's largest square in Lincoln's Inn Fields (not, as many think, Grosvenor Square), a site once used for executions but now for tennis and lunchtimes. The Old and New Squares of Lincoln's Inn itself are real delights, the only mediaeval touch to be found in WC2.

We are in the heart of Theatreland here, ranging from the grandiloquence of the Coliseum and the Royal Opera House to the more standardized type - the Vaudeville or the Albery, as examples - to the adventurous Donmar Warehouse.

Transport
Public transport in WC2 means either a slow bus, a crowded tube or the mighty colossus of Charing Cross Station, built in 1864 on the site of Hungerford Market, which gave its name to the corresponding rail and foot bridge. E.M. Barry designed the imposing hotel over the front entrance and Terry Farrell did the huge offices over the station that face the river. It is one of London's greatest termini, and wherever you are in Britain, if you see a road sign with a mileage to London, it is to Charing Cross that it is measured. It takes trains all over southern England and abroad.

This is the land of the underground, with the Northern Line represented at Embankment, Charing Cross and Leicester Square, the Piccadilly at Leicester Square, Covent Garden and Holborn, the Central Line at Holborn and the Circle and District at Embankment and the Temple. How busy this part of town is can be gauged by the distances between the tube stations of Leicester Square-Covent Garden and Charing Cross-Embankment. They are the shortest anywhere on the network. Aldwych station on the Strand, after being under threat for many years, finally closed in 1994 and began a new life as a film set.

If you are a car driver, be patient and hope that you don't have to park in these parts. Waterloo Bridge is the only road bridge in this postcode, and is also the possessor of the finest river view in London (aficionados of Tower Bridge will disagree). You can descend underground from the bridge using the old tram tunnel to miss the Aldwych and emerge on Kingsway. But, if you can, leave the car behind or have your stress levels seriously tested.

Steve Roberts

History


Welcome to the River Holebourne. For the first fifteen centuries of its history, London was known as the place of two cities - the City and Westminster - linked by just one great road - the Thames.

Holborn (the river Holebourne was a tributary of the Fleet) was built up in the 16th century and Covent Garden (the market garden for Westminster Abbey until the Reformation) followed suit in a planned housing scheme from 1627 onwards.

By 1639 the square at Covent Garden was complete, a bizarre sight for those who had not been to the Continent before and seen the novelty of terraced housing facing into its own courtyard.

Holborn had been slowly emerging with the Inns of Chancery and later the Inns of Court, and though most of the Inns have subsequently been dissolved, the legal whiff in the air is still strong in these parts. The City and Westminster were now linked by the Strand/Fleet Street, and WC2 began its rich life.

So, little here is of any great antiquity. In the case of many of the roads, many are of Victorian/Edwardian origin. The Embankments date from the 1860s and the neat and impressive Victoria Embankment Gardens in the shadow of Charing Cross station show the extent of the reclaimed land.

Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue were created in the 1880s. The 1905 Kingsway and the Aldwych, complete with their underground tram lines, were the last great new road schemes central London ever saw.

And thus even the street plans, which retain their positions in the City, are missing from here. The sumptuous palaces that lined the Strand are long gone (although the little Savoy chapel lingers on), the buildings in Covent Garden (except for the church) are all rebuilds from the 1830s and the only edifices of any great antiquity are within Lincoln's Inn.

But then this place is no museum, and is host to as wide a range of institutions as can be imagined. The Royal College of Surgeons, the London School of Economics, the National Portrait Gallery, the Public Record Office (now partly hived off to Kew), the Royal Courts of Justice, Somerset House with its myriad tenants, King's College University and the BBC World Service at Bush House are just a few of WC2's prestigious tenants.

Steve Roberts.

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