Shanghai Bob

The guy on Garrick Street who calls out, “If you are lost or require information” is working for tips. There are plenty of potential customers (i.e., lost people) there, but I don’t know how many are happy to be asked to pay to become unlost.

I have spent a day or two drawing maps of Covent Garden from memory. I originally pictured Covent Garden as a pennant on the mast of Monmouth Street, but after playing with a few drawings, it seems more appropriate to think of it as a hat, specifically a witch’s hat: its shape is more irregular than the perfect triangle of a pennant, and the “Covent” of Covent Garden is perfectly balanced between convent (a residence for religious brothers or especially sisters) and coven (a congregation of witches).

Both come from the same Latin word convenire, to come together or convene. The double rectangle of the garden and the Opera House makes a perfect buckle, and imagining a Union Jack patch at the western edge of Shelton Street makes it easy to reconstruct Seven Dials from memory.

Here’s the outline in the correct north-south orientation. I left out most of the internal streets to make the witch hat shape clear. This drawing fits exactly over the mini A-Z: I took no artistic license!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 7:23 pm and is filed under london.