In the teeming, disordered, and sexually charged square half-mile centred on London’s Covent Garden something extraordinary evolved in the eighteenth century. It was the world’s first creative ‘Bohemia’.

In the teeming, disordered, and sexually charged square half-mile centred on London’s Covent Garden something extraordinary evolved in the eighteenth century. It was the world’s first creative ‘Bohemia’. The nation’s most significant artists, actors, poets, novelists, and dramatists lived here. From Soho and Leicester Square across Covent Garden’s Piazza to Drury Lane, and down from Long Acre to the Strand, they rubbed shoulders with rakes, prostitutes, market people, craftsmen, and shopkeepers. It was an often brutal world full of criminality, poverty and feuds, but also of high spirits, and an intimacy that was as culturally creative as any other in history. Virtually everything that we associate with Georgian culture was produced here.

‘A jostling, ripely enjoyable social history of a time when central London had its own raffish left bank.’ Peter Conrad, Observer, Books of the Year

‘A gorgeously engrossing book, bracingly sceptical of received pieties … As well as recording Covent Garden’s buzz and buoyancy, Gatrell aims to alter how we think about eighteenth-century painting … against Reynolds and the Royal Academicians Gatrell pits the realists, who drew or painted the street life of workaday Londoners. Boozy, arty and sexually charged, Covent Garden in the mid-1700s surges spectacularly into life in this engrossing history.’ John Carey, Sunday Times

‘Welcome to Vic Gatrell’s London … His brilliant account brings it all to life … In its sweep of visual arts, social history, literary criticism and bawdy culture The First Bohemians provides a superb chronicle of a golden age of authentic, urban creativity.’ Tristram Hunt, The Times
‘Rich and surprising … nobody knows this world better than Gatrell, and the result is a sumptuous, teeming with cartoonists, poets and streetwalkers.’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times, Books of the Year

‘The great joy of the book is how effortlessly and continuously his narrative and pictures illuminate one another… It is a tour de force of social and pictorial history that few living historians could match … a triumphantly successful re-creation of a fascinating world.’ Faramerz Dabhoiwala, Guardian