Wine Bar Research Articles

Trouble brewing.

Social taboos surrounding women and drink have gradually broken down in the past few years. Alcohol is easily accessible from well stocked supermarket shelves and wine bars have become popular meeting places for women. Heads are less likely to turn when a woman walks into a pub on her own and the sight of a woman taking her turn to buy a round of drinks at the bar is commonplace.

Wine Bars

This country's first wine bar opened a short five years ago. Today, wine bars are operating or planned in every major American city. What are the secrets of success in this exciting new form of beverage operation?

Covent Garden Newly Marketed

COVENT Garden's shops are, since June 1980, once more causing eyes to hang, and in the spaces between the rows ears bend to string quartets, nostrils quiver to a Reuben's salt beef sandwich or wine bar bottle. For the Central Market building, which since the removal of the florists, fruiterers and greengrocers to the 'New Covent Garden Market' at Nine Elms, Battersea has been hidden behind builders' hoardings, was newly revealed to the public as 'London's historic new shopping experience' in June 1980. The story of its restoration is ably told and handsomely illustrated in Robert Thorne's Covent Gar_denMarket: Its History and Restoration. * Inigo Jones's Piazza of 1630-1 is often described as the birthplace of modern town planning in London. Certainly the Bedfords, of whom the fifth earl received in 1670a royal charter for a daily market here for fruit, flowers, roots and herbs, perfected the elegant London town square while the West End as we now know it was still at the very end of the town (see LONDON JOURNAL 2, i (1976), 97-100). By 1677-8 there were 22 shops against the garden wall of Bedford House. By 1707the house was demolished, the market proper kept within railings around the Piazza, and 48 shops built inside. Thorne likens them to 'a row of garden tool-sheds'; they are to be seen in many contemporary engravings and paintings. By 1748 rebuilding added 106more substantial shops in two rows, cellars of which survived as vaults beneath the present Central Market Building. From 1980 there are now some 50 shops trading from the address 'The Market, London W.C.2.' They outnumber the 40 craft and other stalls known as the 'Apple Market' that operate in the building's north hall from cast-iron trading stands salvaged from the old Flower Market. All of these activities occupy the restored Central Market Building erected in stages during 1829-30 to the designs of Charles Fowler , who came to London from Exeter in 1814. Robert Thorne describes how Fowler's imaginative designs for Hungerford Market (where Charing Cross station now stands) favourably attracted the attention of the Duke of Bedford's solicitor, J. H. Fisher. Fowler adopted a Greek Revival style, using Aberdeen granite for the columns of the colonnades, entablatures and balustrades of Yorkshire stone, and brick for most of the walls. The Central Market Building formed an elongated E-shape within the Piazza, with the north and south halls between the bars of the E unroofed for the first forty or so years. A contribution to the Gardener's Magazine, un-named but attributed to J. C. Loudon, praised 'a structure at once perfectly fitted for its various uses; of great architectural beauty and elegance; and so expressive of the purpose for which it is erected, that it cannot by any possibility be mistaken for any thing else than what it is'. Cunningham, in his Hand-book of London (1850) declared the fruiterers' and florists' shops inside the building 'one of the prettiest sights in London' . Yet the working conditions were soon cramped, and what exposure to the elements meant we can only guess at with a hint in the illuminated testimonial presented to the 9th Duke of Bedford in