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|title=The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London's Golden Age

|sort=First Bohemians: Life and Art in London's Golden Age, The

|publisher=Allen Lane

|date=October 2013

|summary=The artistic community, and its main personalities, from the square half-mile centred on London's Covent Garden during the eighteenth century.

}}

It was in the eighteenth century that an area of London consisting of about half a square mile, from Soho and Leicester Square across Covent Garden’s Piazza to Drury Lane, and down from Long Acre to the Strand, with Covent Garden at the very centre, became what has in modern times been recognised as the world’s first creative ‘bohemia’. This was where the cream of Britain’s significant artists, actors, poets, novelists, and dramatists of the age lived and worked, side by side with the city’s chief market traders, craftsmen, shopkeepers, rakes, pickpockets and prostitutes. One might say that all human life was here.