As part of our ‘crammed-with-fun’ long weekend in London in late October, our eldest son made sure we experienced one of the city’s most colourful traditions on Sunday morning: the Columbia Road Flower Market.
The market has a rich history. It was established in 1869 by Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, the daughter of a reformist politician and one of the wealthiest women in England at the time, having inherited the £1.8 million banking fortune of her step-grandmother. Most of her money was spent on philanthropy, including scholarships, endowments and charitable acts such as the co-founding, with Charles Dickens, of a home for young women who had “turned to a life of immorality”, including theft and prostitution.
Baroness Burdett-Coutts was also a benefactor of the Church of England and endowed the bishoprics in Cape Town (where she was active in improving the condition for blacks), Adelaide and British Columbia. On land in East London’s Bethnal Green, she pioneered social housing, establishing the housing development Holly Village on a corner of her estate (now part of Highgate) In 1869, she founded the Columbia Market in Nova Scotia Gardens, a small slum in an old brick field near St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, that had become notorious in the 1830s for body-robbing and murder by a gang called the Resurrection Men (what a great name!)
Built as a covered food market with 400 stalls, the market was originally held on Saturdays but changed to Sunday by royal edict in order to accommodate Jewish traders. The change also allowed vendors from Covent Garden and Spitalfields to sell their left-over Saturday flowers. After the second world war (when the market and its underlying bomb shelter suffered a direct hit in September 1940), it went into gradual decline. In the 1960s, new rules obliged vendors to attend their stalls on a regular basis and the market enjoyed renewed popularity. (Source: Wikipedia)
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Today there are little antique shops, jewelers and home furnishing boutiques lining the market, and a few stalls for non-flower vendors. Buskers work the crowds, the coffee is rich and dark, and the croissants are divine! But the real draw are the flowers: fresh, inexpensive and beautiful……
And sometimes labelled with rather creative names.
It’s such a shame not to soak in the atmosphere that I decided to make a little video to give you a real flavour of the place. Enjoy! And do sniff those lilies, why don’tcha, darlin’? Just 5 quid a bunch!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8S8-EmTaYo