Lloyd’s Bank Chamber

One of six neo-Renaissance stone and brick blocks erected in or near the Piazza between 1876 & 1890 to the design of Henry Clutton or influenced by his work. The white-framed glass gazebo at ground level is the entrance to Le Boulestin a spacious subterranean restaurant founded in 1926. When Art Deco was new, this was one of London’s most expensive dining places, and certainly the most stylish, with its modern murals, fabrics and fittings. Chef Marcel Boulestin was the world’s first television chef appearing on BBC in 1937. The site was previously occupied by an Edwardian hotel, the Covent Garden and before that the Bedford Head Hotel.

Number 43 King Street

Now the oldest construction in the Piazza is in the northwest corner. The history of its occupancy mirrors the changing economic fortunes of Covent Garden. Originally until 1756 it was Lord Archer's substantial private mansion. Later it was rented to a peruke maker (wig maker), before it became the home of the new Royal Institute of Architects. Exclusive clubs followed but later it became the premises of George Monro a wholesale fruiterer and is now occupied by a small public relations company.

Russell Street

This exits the Piazza on the east, overlooked by the first floor terrace of the Central Market building. A restaurant re-creates the original conservatory, which displayed indoor plants and flowers in the wholesale market. The street is names after Francis Russell, the fourth Earl of Bedford (hence Bedford Chambers and Bedford Street) who commissioned Inigo Jones to build the Piazza.

Many of England’s essayists and writers frequented three of the street’s coffee houses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wills, on the corner of Bow Street at No.1 was the favourite of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, the masters of restoration comedy. William Congreve and William Wycherley and the satirist John Swift were all regulars at the ‘wits’ room on the first floor.

Across the way, No.17, was Tom’s where you could have found the poet Oliver Goldsmith, the literary master Dr Samuel Johnson and his former pupil, actor-manager David Garrick.

A few doors down at No.10 was Button’s, a haunt of the essayist and fiction writer Daniel Defoe and the founders of the Tatler and the Spectator Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steel. The eponymous Daniel Button was a former servant of the Addison’s whom he acquired when he married Lady Warwick. At No8 you can drink a cup of coffee today in the very house, then a bookshop, where Dr Johnson first met his biographer James Boswell.