The seventies began with a post-sixties hangover of radicalism and protest, and ended with Margaret Thatcher sweeping into Downing Street, signaling the death knell for Britain’s traditional industries and many of its ways of life.

Nowhere epitomised this dramatic story more than Covent Garden market where the spirit of activism infused the local community when, in the early 1970s, planners proposed to bulldoze the area and move residents out.

It was a real David and Goliath story. When the planners were defeated, it appeared to be a victory for the community - a first in British planning history. But was it? The battle was won but, in the long term, was the war lost to the march of gentrification and the demands of tourism in the post-industrial age?

For the first time in over forty years, we hear from the main protagonists in the Covent Garden story, all still passionate to put their side. What emerges is a vivid and personal portrait of a wonderfully eclectic community that fought for its right to survive and to save its historic buildings, but who now regard their triumph as at best a Pyrrhic Victory*.

*King Pyrrhus of Epirus defeated the Romans at Heraclea in 280BC but his army was decimated in the process.

Content last updated: 12/05/2009

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