The People’s Piazza: A History of Covent Garden – Sunday November

13, BBC Two

If you’ve ever visited London as a tourist, you’ve probably spent some time in Covent Garden. A cobbled piazza packed with benign activity, it’s a de facto destination. In this standalone documentary, that perceptive historian David Olusoga traced its centuries-spanning saga. It may be a small area of central London, but Covent Garden is steeped in incident. Olusoga focused on this piazza to achieve his usual goal: while examining individual case studies, all of them based within a particular locale, he presented a penetrating essay driven by a deep, empathetic understanding of what can be learned from historical injustices. It was also quite funny and colourful at times. He’s very good at this.