Christina Smith OBE

Idiosyncratic and colourful landlord, entrepreneur, property developer and philanthropist known as ‘the queen of Covent Garden’

Christina Smith was walking through Covent Garden in the early 1960s when she spotted a “to let” sign on a former potato warehouse. Excited by its potential and enthralled by the “seedy atmosphere and the seedy people” of the bustling fruit and vegetable market, she borrowed £1,500 from her father and opened Goods and Chattels, importing and wholesaling colourful trinkets from South America. It was the start of a multimillion pound property and retail empire, with the former propping up the latter to create the quirky, colourful shops for which Covent Garden became famous. Her philosophy was an eclectic combination of business and philanthropy. “I have always had a faintly maternal feeling towards my tenants, even when they’re not paying their rent,” she said. In the property sector, however, she had a reputation as a tough negotiator. Known as the “queen of Covent Garden”, Smith was also a restaurateur, philanthropist, conservationist, mentor, art collector and theatre angel. As Luke Johnson, the Pizza Express entrepreneur, wrote in The Sunday Times, she was “a renaissance woman . . . a woman who made things happen — always with style”. She was also a true eccentric, once dragging a friend to an exhibition of works by the surrealist artist René Magritte with papier-mâché bananas round their necks. She owned both freeholds and leaseholds, often acquiring tail-end leases and negotiating an extension. This made her the area’s largest private landlord, with dozens of tenants including The Creative Business, Neal Street Restaurant and Lynne Franks PR. Often she was simply the right person in the right place at the right time. “I don’t think I ever thought ahead very much,” she said. “If I had, I would have expanded faster and probably made a financial mess of things. When buying Covent Garden property I thought of it more as preserving what I felt to be a fine building, rather than as a long-term investment.” Before long she was also importing goods from Asia. “China had an amazing impact on me,” she said. “I found the people, the business methods and the commodities fascinating.” These discoveries found an outlet in Neal Street East, her vast emporium of colourful textiles, fragrant incenses and tinkling wind chimes that became part of the Covent Garden experience. Many of Smith’s businesses used her name, such as the Cas-bah, based on her initials. Smith’s Galleries had an impressive roster of shows, including David Hockney’s first public exhibition, while at Smith’s Restaurant she employed Graham Norton as a waiter before he found television fame. She was a tall woman with scraped back hair, loud clothing and huge tinted glasses that matched her ego. She was, however, a terrible delegator, leaving many of her managers feeling underemployed and undermined. There was always a sense of drama. On one occasion she met a friend at the Tea House, another of her enterprises, entertaining him and the customers by chastising the manager because the mugs and teapot were cracked. Some days later the manager revealed to her friend his increasingly plaintive memos requesting new crockery, all of which had gone unanswered. She was never short of things to do, berating people who approached her with their own ideas. “I say, ‘Do them yourself. I’ve got plenty of ideas, I don’t need yours’.” Yet cashflow was invariably a problem, especially in the early days, when banks were reluctant to lend to women, least of all an unmarried one. As she told The Times: “The bailiffs loomed on several occasions.” For more than 50 years Smith lived “above the shop” on Neal Street, with large bowls of dried flowers, old Chesterfield sofas, thousands of oriental artefacts and a red Aga. There was no bath or shower for the first dozen years. The wheels and pulleys that in the market’s heyday hauled up boxes of potatoes were all but hidden by copious amounts of art and books. She was an incorrigible hoarder, with old leather-bound volumes, enormous piles of newspapers and yellowing clippings all waiting to be read. Although irritated by the racket from the buskers below, she had her own ways of dealing with them, including on one occasion emptying her watering can over them. They turned out to be a gang of punks who cheerfully sat down and asked for more. At times she despaired of the crowds and the tat, fearing that she had been part of creating some sort of tourist hell. “I’m prepared to accept it and not be a spoilsport but it’s pretty depressing,” she said, adding that the street-market element was turning Covent Garden into “something more like a Midlands town fairground”. Yet she insisted that the area had a special quality. “Covent Garden gathers momentum during the day,” she said. “Suddenly, especially down James Street and in the piazza, and down Neal Street too, it’s as if the Red Army is walking through the Forbidden City, great streams of people.” Christina Anne Smith was born in London in 1934, the second of three children of Ronald Smith, who was the doctor for Rugby School, and his Finnish wife, Maud (née Campbell), who was of Scottish descent and had come to England as a domestic worker. Her older brother, Derek, predeceased her and she is survived by her sister, Karin, who lives in Florida. She was proud of her heritage and often used the Finnish expression “sisu”, meaning determination or tenacity, to describe her success. Her love of art emerged at an early age and at 16 she bought her first piece, a Picasso print of a dancing girl. A year later she left St Mary’s School, Calne. “I had got as far as taking my university entrance but didn’t do it, which was a bit naughty,” she said. She fainted during an audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, instead taking on several jobs “of the type well-brought-up girls do”, including cooking on a Mediterranean yacht and working on a City switchboard. “It did teach me not to be afraid of banks,” she said. On another occasion, she added: “I always thought that by the age of 30 I’d be married with two children, so I never sat down and mapped out a career plan.” In 1958 a friend helped her to find work in Fulham as a personal assistant to Terence Conran, the designer who in 1964 opened his first Habitat store. It was, she said, “a role that taught me a lot about running a small business”. Conran’s first marriage, to Shirley, was in its final stages and friends assumed that Smith would be her successor, as did the outgoing Mrs Conran, who accused them of having an affair. With feelings running high, Smith slipped away, “going to as many places as I could, Mexico, Seattle, San Francisco, Japan, Nepal, Hong Kong, Bombay and Greece”. During those travels she resolved to move into retail. “I’d been sending samples back to myself in England,” she said. By the time she returned, Conran had a new partner, though 20 years later Smith was his landlord. She once claimed to have introduced him, and thus the rest of Britain, to the duvet. After the fruit and veg market moved from Covent Garden to Nine Elms, in Vauxhall, in 1974, she was involved in saving the area from developers’ proposals for a conference centre, a large hotel, offices and a new road layout. The market hall survived, as did another 250 buildings that were declared to be of historic and architectural interest. As a member of the Covent Garden Community Association, the Seven Dials Trust and the Covent Garden Forum, her eagle eye meticulously scrutinised every planning application. “I wanted to preserve the buildings and protect the residents,” she said. Much of her excess energy went into the Christina Smith Foundation, which supports theatre, architecture, education and the advancement of gender balance. In 1991 she backed the musical Carmen Jones at the Old Vic, which was coproduced by Rosemary Squire, who described Smith as “a great role model for women”. She went on to invest in Squire’s Ambassador Theatre Group, an investment that was repaid tenfold when the business was sold in 2013. The Donmar Warehouse — which, like her Flowersmith florist, was almost opposite her flat — was another source of great pleasure, as were the Trafalgar Studios where she paid for the creation of Trafalgar 2 to encourage small-scale theatre. She wanted to be a member of the Garrick Club, but, she growled, “they are still not letting women in”. Smith’s one golden rule was never to answer the phone before 10am; other than that, she seldom rested. A couple of years ago she downsized, which meant parting with an art collection that included works by Hockney, Maggi Hambling and Henri Matisse. She never married. “I did actually say I’d get married to somebody once, but I changed my mind,” she said. “After that I thought I ought to be extremely sure. And I never asked anybody to marry me. Perhaps I should have done.

Christina Smith OBE, entrepreneur, was born on March 27, 1934. She died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease on March 11, 2022, aged 87