From Inigo Jones to Social Housing: Covent Garden

For most tourists, Covent Garden usually is not the first places to visit when touring in London.

Covent Garden is located in the junction area of the borough of Westminster and Camden, between the Westminster City and the City of London. Therefore, in the urban history of London, Covent Garden is a relatively younger region in the development history of London city.

In the mind of Inigo Jones, Covent Garden should be an idealized and improved British version of a typical Italian neighborhood: four rows of residential housings surround a central piazza with a church in the middle as the social gathering center.

The idea behind the planning of Covent Garden was to divide separate living communities for London citizens with social incomes. It was meant to be a gentrified neighborhood for the upper middle class. However, rather ironically, when two grocery market were introduced into the central piazza, along with the growth of population in London and the deterioration of the sanitation of the urban environment, wealthy families soon moved out of Covent Garden to the west side of the city and finally into the countryside.

It really came as a surprise to me when I got to know that the Odhams Walk is actually a housing project sits at the center of the dense commercial district. The Odhams Walks is a social housing project dates back to 1960s. It was designed by the Great London Council is as sociation with designer Donald Bull. It created a quite world of gardening, excluding all the noise and crowdedness of the outside world.

One interesting thing about the Council Housing projects is that they always focus on the collectiveness and compactness. They are trying to create a microscopic, scaled-down city within the boundaries of the construction site. Such projects (such as the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Robin Hood Garden, etc.) share some common characteristics: Multiple layers and circulations, heavily exploited ground (multiple ground floors, many of which are hidden beneath the central plaza )

The housing project is constructed above a semi-underground carpark.

The floor plans at the entrance of the Odhams Walk.

The multiple layers of the Odhams Walks enable a diversity of circulations and also plenty of terraced spaces for outdoor gardens. The routes to the top floor were deliberately zigzagged so that the visitor (also the residents) will constantly moving between the interior and the exterior of the Odhams Walk. 

View of the inside of the Odhams Walk

The meandered and significantly different paths on different levels exaggerate the physical area of the project, residents and visitors have to walk constantly between the indoor and outdoor space, sometimes pass through one of the resident's font yard, sometimes