Neal's Yard is one of my favourite spots in central... it's an unexpected, colourful little oasis that's tucked away enough for a lot of people (including me for 3 years of my time in London) to miss it, but which definitely deserves a visit. Located by Covent Garden, it's home to the now famous brands Neal's Yard Remedies and Neal's Yard Dairy, and also Monmouth coffee, which is known for being one of the top coffee places in London (as a massive coffee enthusiast, I first found Neal's Yard while looking for Monmouth rather than the other way around...).
Where is Neal's Yard and how do you get to it?
It's only about 5 minutes from Covent Garden market, and there are two alleyways that lead to it, but they're not particularly easy to spot: one is via Monmouth Street and the other via Short's Gardens, which is just off Neal Street.
London's hidden history: the total transformation of Neal's Yard
Neal's Yard does owe its name to Thomas Neale, who received a piece of land in 1690 from William III and transformed it into the surrounding Seven Dials area, but contrary to Wikipedia, the area actually has Nicholas Saunders to thank for making Neal’s Yard the place it is today.
Until the mid-1970s, it was a dark, rat-infested area that didn’t even appear on the London A-Z.
Then, in 1976, Saunders was looking for somewhere to live in Covent Garden/Soho area and was shocked to find that he could buy the entire area of 2 Neal's Yard for under £7,000... the only problem being that that it was let for "next to nothing," and the area was scheduled for redevelopment.
He decided to purchase it with the aim of living there and refurbishing it to prevent it from its scheduled demolition, but couldn’t get the planning permission to do so. Still determined to do something with the land, he found a loophole and decided to start a whole food shop there.
Despite the planning council bluntly refusing his request to do so, he was told by his solicitor that it actually didn’t require permission and so he got started the project, even though it did seem an unusual location for it - at the time, the surrounding buildings all looked derelict and had the windows boarded up or broken.
He aimed to start a Wholefood shop that had a sense of community and was different to the others he'd seen: he wanted one that was "cheap, efficient and would not make customers feel bad because they could not recognise a mung bean".
After Saunders had spent 3 months along with other amateurs working on the shop, built cheaply using materials from demolition sites, it was ready to open and quickly proved popular because it was priced so cheaply, even undercutting the likes of Sainsbury's.
At the start, the food was packed on the first floor, so when the stocks arrived, they were "was hoisted up on the human counterweight principle – one person would attach the load, a second would jump out of the window holding the rope coming down from the pulley, while the third would haul in the load". I'm not sure that'd pass safety regulations today, but it worked for them!
Now, nearly half a century later, the Yard is now full of little independent shops with the environment and sustainability at their core, and Saunders says that a lot of the people working were once customers who just asked for a job while they were shopping there.
So although Neal's Yard is now a hotspot for tourists and instagrammers, it has a real sense of being a "village community" according to Saunders, and there have even been lots of romances develop between the people working there, “the most dramatic being when Anita of the Coffee House married Randolph of the Dairy. They held a sit down feast for everyone in the Yard – and symbolised their union by serving coffee ice-cream."
Read more about the history of this interesting little area at: www.nealsyardlondon.co.uk/history
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