Covent Garden Cakery

I wrote about Candy Cakes at HC's request on the Valentine's Day gift ideas for the shopping pages at work. (The same shopping pages I keep being told are hugely popular among the European visitors to the website: nice!)

A couple of days' later, an invite comes into our general inbox. Would we like to attend the press launch of a new Candy Cakes shop in Covent Garden?

Err, yes please!

So, instead of going straight to work on Tuesday, I make a little detour (ahem) to Covent Garden for 9am-ish, to hunt out Candy Cakes' new abode. (Get into the office at 10am. Job's a good'un.)

If you're a regular in CG, you probably know all about the shop already. When I spy the mint green walks and lurid pink stools seemingly shining from below as I'm upstairs in the empty, early morning market (having only the briefest of My Fair Lady moments) it certainly has the look of something that's been around for a while. Indeed, I find out they've been there since August. Odd that they're having a press launch, then. Well, for whatever reason, they are, and I'm there.

It's a great place. I've written about it on londonist here, and I hope to include it elsewhere on VL. I really enjoyed spending time there (despite their stammering, ?nervous? marketing manager.) I think if I were a tourist, particularly a young one, I'd think this place was pretty magical.

Shamefully, I didn't get the name of the artist responsible for the brilliant art on the walls. I feel bad about that. In fact, I should contact the nice PR girls and find out.

And I have to admit that, because I'm NOT a tourist, the likelihood of me going down into the very centre of busking, twee, packed, pricey Covent Garden Market for a simple cup of coffee is probably very poor, no matter how delicious the cakes. Running through CG to get somewhere else (theatre, dinner, home); now that's more probable. But I feel like, if you're a Londoner, somehow you don't deserve / need / want to sit in colourful, sugar-sweetened wonder on those remarkably pink seats and feel like you're in another world.

Because Covent Garden doesn't belong to Londoners anymore, like it does at the start of MFL. It's another world alright, but one that belongs to the tourists.