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Thirty places to see first, in order, for somebody who has never been to London. Each says what it is, whether it is free, whether you must book, and whether the queue is worth it.
Street performers in the square, small shops under the glass roof of the old market building, and the Royal Opera House and the theatres in the streets around it. Free to wander.
Covent Garden means the square as much as the building. Inigo Jones laid the piazza out in the 1630s as London's first, on the model of an Italian one, and it spent two centuries as the fruit and vegetable market for the whole city before that trade was moved out to Nine Elms in 1974. What was left is the market building of 1830, glass-roofed and full of small shops, with a lower courtyard where classical musicians play under licence and a portico outside where the street performers work to a crowd standing in a ring.
The reason to walk out of the square rather than stop in it is the quarter around it: the Royal Opera House backs onto the piazza, there are more theatres within a few streets than anywhere else in the world, and the Transport Museum is on the east side. Free to wander, busy from late morning, and worst in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.
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Photo by Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons · Photo by Bert Seghers, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.