It may well be full of tourists – the really annoying, large groups that manage somehow always to get in the way as you’re moving about, the kind that give all other tourists a bad name – but I do have a penchant for Covent Garden. Not for any of the shops, mind, or indeed the transport museum (haven’t been to one of those since holidays with my grandparents as a child), but for the street performers.

Not the ones that line up by the tube station who seem, by and large, to be the same bunch of stand really still and then scare little children performers who also colonise South Bank, but the ones that actually perform little circus tricks outside the west end of the market, or inside at the other end, are those that really interest me. (We’ll conveniently ignore the classical music performance area downstairs!)

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