As Covent Garden’s street performers celebrate 50 years of clowning on the cobbles, Anna Moloney asks why they’re worried about their future

Every morning in Covent Garden at 9:30am, street performers from far and wide draw lots in a bid to perform at the famous cobbled piazza. Slots are allocated randomly and you need meet only three conditions to apply: have a show, have insurance and, for god’s sake, no fire. The latter causes far more trouble than it’s worth, former clown Melvyn Altwarg, now a rep for the Covent Garden Street Performers Association (CGSPA), tells me.

Arguably, however, such performers now operate upon the cobbles illegally.

In 2021, Westminster Council introduced new rules mandating formal licenses for all street performance in the borough. The CGSPA, however, have been boycotting these for the past four years. Instead, performers in the area have continued to operate under their own system, with performers allowed to disappear their rabbits and swallow their swords without formal permits or external regulation and programming managed by the group itself. “‘Politely refusing’ – that’s the way we’re terming it,” CGSPA spokesperson and stuntman Peter Kofolsky tells me, nodding to his PR rep sat nearby. While the council, he says, have largely left them to it, the group wants a formal exception in writing.

Kofolsky, or Heavy Metal Pete as he’s more commonly known, took to street performing when he found he could make more in an hour from juggling than working on building sites. Now, he regularly dazzles crowds at the piazza with a spine-prickling stunt, in which he lies sandwiched between two beds of nails with an audience member perched on top. “There’s actually no trick to it,” he admits. It just hurts. But Kofolsky doesn’t mind suffering for his art.

I’ve come to meet him and Altwarg under the more pedestrian setting of a coffee at the Seven Dials Playhouse Cafe ahead of festivities over the weekend celebrating 50 years of street performance at Covent Garden. The event was not designed as a protest party, but has increasingly started to look like one amid the growing licensing spat.

Kofolsky tells me the group has been operating under an “informal truce”........

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