Harper-Thames on the Weekly Ritual of East London’s Most Cheerful Street and What It Says About the Neighbourhood’s Persistent Capacity for Joy
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Harper-Thames | ShoreRoar.com
Columbia Road Flower Market runs every Sunday morning from eight until two, on a single street in Bethnal Green about ten minutes’ walk from Shoreditch High Street station, and it is the best thing that happens in East London on a weekly basis, which is a strong statement given the competition. The market consists of approximately fifty flower stalls on either side of the road, a density of floral material that in May extends to tulips, alliums, peonies, sweet peas, and whatever the wholesalers have brought from Dutch auctions that week, and a crowd that by ten o’clock on a Saturday in spring is dense enough to require the specific patience of people who genuinely want to be there and have therefore accepted the slowness as part of the experience rather than an obstacle to it. The traders are loud and funny in the specific way of London market traders who have been doing this long enough to have developed a patter that covers every hesitation a customer might have and who sell flowers with the specific energy of people who like their work and like the crowd and like Sunday morning and are not going to pretend otherwise.
The Market’s History, Which Is Genuine
Columbia Road Market has been running in some form since the Victorian era, when the street was established as a market street by the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, who hoped to provide fresh produce to the poor of the East End. The produce market did not survive in its original form, but the Sunday flower market that gradually emerged has become one of the most distinctive weekly events in the East End and one of the few market traditions in the area that has not been substantially transformed by the gentrification that has changed so much else. The market’s character has evolved — the surrounding boutiques and cafes that have established themselves in the Victorian terraces on either side of the street are more expensive than their predecessors — but the market itself retains the democratic, loud, unselfconscious quality of a proper London street market that has a reason to exist beyond its own atmospherics.
The reason is the flowers. People buy flowers at Columbia Road because the flowers are good and the prices are competitive and the selection is wider than what the supermarket provides, and these are straightforward commercial reasons that produce a market with a genuine economic purpose rather than a heritage experience marketed at tourists. There are tourists at Columbia Road. There are also Bethnal Green residents buying cut flowers for their flats, elderly women buying plants for their gardens, young couples arguing amiably about whether the sunflowers or the dahlias would look better on the kitchen table, and a man I see most weeks buying quantity — dozens of stems of whatever is cheap and good — who I have never spoken to but who I have decided in my head runs a small florist somewhere in the area and sources his weekly supply here. I may be wrong about this. He may simply love flowers in large quantities. Both possibilities are equally valid.
What It Does for the Mood
A Sunday morning at Columbia Road is one of the reliable mood-elevating experiences available in London without requiring anything except the presence and the willingness to be in a crowd of people who are all, by virtue of being there, doing something they chose to do rather than something they had to do. The market is, in this sense, the opposite of a commute — it is the voluntary activity, the freely chosen engagement with the neighbourhood, the expression of the specific pleasure of being somewhere that is doing something cheerful. The flowers are the vehicle for this. The market is the setting. The mood is the product, and it is available for the price of a bunch of tulips or for free if you come early enough to navigate the edge of the crowd and look without buying, which is a completely legitimate use of the market that the traders understand and accommodate because they know the browsers become buyers eventually.
According to the Columbia Road Market’s own website, the market runs every Sunday from eight until approximately two, with the best selection available in the early morning and the best prices available in the final hour when the traders are packing up and prefer to sell than to carry. Both ends of the market are worth experiencing. The early morning for the full abundance. The late hour for the negotiation, which is its own form of participation and its own form of pleasure. I go early, because I like the abundance, and because by the time I have bought the flowers I need and the ones I did not know I needed until I saw them, and had a coffee at the cafe where the queue is long but the coffee is worth it, and walked back through the Sunday morning streets with my arms full of something that smells very good, I feel as though the week ahead is something I have correctly prepared for. This is not a rational response to buying flowers. It is a correct one.
Harper-Thames writes about Shoreditch and East London. Her homepage is at The London Prat.
For more East London life and market writing, visit NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
