Zone: Westminster – Chelsea

Covent Garden is a historic area at the very heart of modern London – and it has everything a first-time visitor to London is seeking! This excursion has a delightful mixture of scale – from the truly epic monumental space of Trafalgar Square, and the neoclassical grandeur of the Covent Garden piazza, to tiny hidden lanes that most tourists never see from their tour buses. Lurking under the glamorous facade of glitzy shopping and world-famous West End theatre is London's dubious past – where Princes met courtesans in the back-streets of a vegetable market; where a famous poet was attacked by thugs hired by a XVII century aristocrat; where a King flirted with loose women in a theatre room specially built for the purpose; where Queen Elizabeth I's spymaster-general ran the secret police who caught Guy Fawkes, and where a young courtesan - born in a penniless drunken family - not only became England's leading dramatic actress – she even had her funeral sermon preached by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Covent Garden is London's "theatre-land", and we'll see at least three world-famous theatres on our way! And not only theatre – television itself began in Covent Garden, and we'll see where it happened.