Covent Garden

Before this area became a famous destination for shopping and theater, it served as a quiet kitchen garden for the Benedictine monks of Westminster Abbey. The name Covent Garden is actually a corruption of the term convent garden, referring to the vegetables and herbs the monks cultivated here to feed their community. King Henry the Eighth seized the land during the sixteenth century as part of the dissolution of the monasteries, and it eventually passed into the hands of the Earls of Bedford, who transformed the site into the landmark you see today.