The traders shout, the crowd shuffles and by three o’clock you can carry home a small jungle for very little
Columbia Road on a Sunday: How a Failed Victorian Market Became London’s Flower Street
At eight on a Sunday morning, a narrow street of small Victorian shops on the eastern edge of Shoreditch fills from end to end with greenery. There are buckets of tulips, trays of herbs, banks of hydrangeas, olive trees in pots, ten-foot banana plants and enough eucalyptus to scent a postal district. Down the middle runs a single slow line of people, shuffling at the pace of a wedding procession. Above them the traders are shouting.
The shouting is the thing. Three bunches for a tenner. Everything a fiver. Come on, darling, they will not plant themselves. It is a style of selling that has gone from most of London, and it survives on Columbia Road in full voice. The market has been held here every Sunday for well over a century, and its beginnings lie in one of the grandest failures in the history of Victorian philanthropy.
The Palace That Nobody Used
In the 1860s this was one of the poorest districts in London. The philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, among the richest women in the country and a friend of Charles Dickens, resolved to do something for it. She paid for model dwellings for working families and, beside them, an enormous covered food market, which opened in 1869.
Columbia Market was a staggering building. It looked like a cathedral, with a tall tower, a great hall, cloisters and pious mottoes carved in the stonework. It was meant to give the poor a clean, orderly place to buy wholesome food at fair prices, away from the street sellers.
It failed almost at once. The costermongers preferred the streets, where they paid no rent and could shout as they pleased. The customers followed them. The established markets saw off the competition. Within a few years the great hall stood largely empty. It was used for workshops and storage, and was finally pulled down in the late 1950s. Blocks of flats now stand on the site. Scarcely a trace remains but some railings and gate piers.
Why Sunday
The traders, meanwhile, went on doing business in the road outside. The market began as a Saturday affair. It moved to Sunday to suit the many Jewish traders of the East End, for whom Saturday was the Sabbath, and the change was allowed by special provision at a time when Sunday trading was otherwise tightly restricted.
The flowers came by degrees. Sunday gave growers a chance to sell stock left unsold from the week’s wholesale markets. There was local demand, too. The district had a long tradition of small gardens and window boxes, going back to the Huguenot weavers, who were known for their love of flowers and caged songbirds. By the twentieth century plants had pushed out most other goods.
The Families
Many of the pitches are held by families who have traded here for generations. A good number grow their own stock at nurseries in Essex and beyond, loading the vans in the small hours to be set up by dawn. Pitches pass from parents to children. The licences are issued by Tower Hamlets council, in whose borough the market lies, a short walk from the boundary with Hackney.
The patter is a craft handed down with the pitch, and it carries a good deal of old East End speech. If a trader tells you a plant wants a drop of fisherman’s daughter, he means water. The guide to Cockney rhyming slang will see you through the rest.
The Shops Behind the Stalls
The market’s fortunes have gone up and down. By the 1970s it had dwindled and there was talk of closure. Its revival owed much to the traders’ own determination and to a growing national enthusiasm for gardening. As the crowds returned, the shops along the street, about sixty small Victorian units, filled with independent businesses: galleries, perfumers, hat makers, vintage dealers, bakers and a shop selling nothing but gardening equipment of remarkable beauty and price.
Many open chiefly at weekends. The street has resisted the chains to a degree almost unique in inner London, helped by the smallness of the premises and by landlords and a council that have valued its character. There are pubs at either end and cafes in the side courts, where buskers play and people sit on the kerb drinking coffee with a potted fern between their knees.
How to Do It
A word of practical advice, since the market punishes the unprepared. It runs from about eight in the morning until mid-afternoon, on Sundays only. The street is narrow and by eleven it is packed. If you dislike crowds, go at eight, when the stock is at its best and the traders have time to talk. If you like a bargain, go after two, when they begin selling off what is left and prices fall sharply.
Bring a strong bag. Bring some cash, although most stalls now take cards. Do not bring a pushchair or a bicycle unless you wish to learn some new words. The nearest stations are Hoxton on the Overground and Bethnal Green on the Central line, and several buses stop on Hackney Road; routes are on the Transport for London site. And think about how you are getting home. I once watched a man attempt to board a bus with a palm tree. The driver took a long look at him and opened the middle doors.
The Pressure of Success
Popularity brings its own troubles. On a fine Sunday the crush can be alarming, and residents of the side streets find their front doors blocked by people taking photographs. A share of the crowd comes to take pictures and buys nothing, which does little for those who make their living here. Rents for the shops have climbed and some long-standing independents have left.
There is a balance to be kept between a working market that sells plants to local people and an attraction that features on every list of things to do in London. So far it has been kept, more or less. A geranium costs much the same as it would anywhere and far less than at a garden centre, which is the surest sign that the place is still doing its real job.
What Burdett-Coutts Got Wrong
I often think of the lost market hall when I am here. It was built with the best of intentions by someone who believed the poor needed to be given order, shelter and improving texts. What they wanted was the street. The costermongers she hoped to tidy indoors are, in a sense, still out there, shouting, and they have outlasted her cathedral by more than sixty years.
A sense of humour is native to the market, and it suits the house I write for. My colleagues on the British satirical news and English satirical news desks would be at home on any of these pitches, as would the writers at NewsThump. The essay on what satirical commentary is, and what it is not explains their trade. Mine, this morning, was simpler: I bought two bunches of ranunculus and a rosemary bush, and I regret nothing. More of my local reporting is on my author page at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
