David Olusoga’s Covent Garden Piazza stands in the tradition of the Radio Ballads & History Workshop. But…
On 13th November BBC2 broadcast a programme fronted by the historian David Olusoga on the history of Covent Garden (available on IPlayer for 12 months+). It’s part of a wider project and is broadly in the context of a people’s history.
In the programme Olusoga looked at the history of Covent Garden, its connections with wealth and the sex trade and of course the fruit and flower markets. These closed in 1974. Olusoga rightly underlined the successful fight by the community to make sure that at the point the whole area wasn’t raised to the ground and replaced by a shopping centre and flats. It remains in the original market format with restaurants, bars and shops aimed at the more well to do end of the tourist market.
Olusoga interviewed several men who had worked in the market, recounting their background and what it was like. They were of course all white, since jobs were very much a friends and family affair. Almost 50 years on that fits uneasily with modern Britain. While I’m not familiar with the matter I suspect there may have been market workers from other ethnic background.
Olusoga focused on issues of gender and ethnicity in the history of Covent Garden but the potential issue of racism was in the background. Could for example people from the Windrush Generation get work at the market.
It’s a wider issues with the genre of people’s histories. One thinks of Charles Parker and Euan MacColl’s Radio Ballads (1957-1964) and the early work of History Workshop, for example the project to capture working and social life at Headington Quarry in Oxford. Ethnicity and racism are not central features but over fifty years on the question should not be avoided.
This should not take away from what David Olusoga has done with the Covent Garden programme. It is giving a 2020s perspective on and historical research tradition that hasn’t really been a feature since the early 1970s. One hopes it might spark more.
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