Cyndi Himmelstiere on the flowers, the crowds, and what the market means to the neighbourhood around it
LONDON, UK – Columbia Road flower market runs on Sunday mornings from eight until two and is simultaneously the most beautiful street market in London and one of the most Instagram-saturated, qualities that coexist in a specific tension. Cyndi Himmelstiere covers Shoreditch and East London for Bohiney Magazine and for The London Prat, and was at Columbia Road last Sunday, arriving at seven-thirty to beat the crowds and leaving at eleven when the crowds had become the market.
The Market at Seven Thirty
At seven-thirty, Columbia Road is the market it is supposed to be. The stalls are being set up. The flowers are fresh and the traders are still speaking to each other rather than to customers, which means you hear the actual language of the market rather than the performance of it. The prices at this hour are negotiable. The traders know their regulars and greet them with the specific familiarity of a commercial relationship that has become something warmer without quite becoming friendship. The street smells of cut stems and wet stone and the coffee from the stall at the east end that opens early and has been there for years.
The flowers themselves are extraordinary and are the reason the market exists and the reason the Instagram exists: the scale of the display, the density of colour, the quantity of bloom packed into a street that is only a few hundred metres long, produces a visual effect that is genuinely remarkable. This is not a constructed thing. It is the natural result of a large number of traders displaying a large quantity of flowers in close proximity. The photographs are accurate. The market looks like that.
The Market at Ten Thirty
By ten-thirty, the crowd is significant and the character has shifted. The negotiating is harder because there is always someone behind you willing to pay the asking price. The traders are performing for the cameras because the cameras are there and because performance is part of the transaction. The prices for the most photogenic arrangements have drifted upward to meet the visitor price expectation, which is higher than the local price expectation and which the market serves when the visitors outnumber the locals. This is not a complaint. Markets price to demand. The demand at Columbia Road on a Sunday morning has changed because the market has become famous, and the fame is the result of the beauty, and the beauty is the result of the market. The loop is self-sustaining. The Tower Hamlets council manages the market’s licence; it has operated in some form since the mid-19th century.
The Neighbourhood Around It
Columbia Road itself, outside the market hours, is a quiet street in Bethnal Green with independent shops and cafes that have settled into the overflow of the market’s visitor economy. The shops are good: a ceramics shop, a bookshop, several plant shops that have positioned themselves as extensions of the market into the week. The houses on the street are Victorian terraces that have been gentrified with the specific care that heritage-aware professionals apply to period properties: original features preserved, kitchens entirely replaced.
The residents of these houses have a complicated relationship with the market that puts five to eight thousand people on their street every Sunday morning. The market is why the street is interesting and therefore why the houses cost what they cost. The market is also eight thousand people outside their windows until two in the afternoon on their day off. Both things are true. This is the condition of living in a London neighbourhood that is also a destination, which is an increasingly common condition and one that does not resolve without loss on at least one side. Cyndi Himmelstiere finds this condition interesting and worth documenting, which is why she was there at seven-thirty, and why she will be there again next Sunday, earlier if possible. For more on Columbia Road, see The Daily Mash.
The contradiction of Columbia Road is the contradiction of every London market that has become famous: the fame is the result of what the market genuinely is, and the fame changes what the market is, and the changed market continues to be genuinely worth visiting, just differently than before. This is not a satisfying resolution but it is the honest one. Cyndi Himmelstiere was at Columbia Road at seven-thirty on Sunday, bought flowers she did not need, drank coffee she definitely needed, and left before the worst of the crowds, which is both the privilege of someone who knows the market well enough to arrive early and the discipline of a journalist who knows when she has what she came for. She will be back. The market will be there. Both of them will have changed slightly by then, which is also the condition of a neighbourhood worth reporting from. For more on Columbia Road, see The Daily Mash.
The Ongoing Market
Columbia Road market continues every Sunday regardless of what is written about it, which is the most important thing about it and the thing that writing about markets most reliably fails to convey. The flowers are cut and loaded on Saturday night and arrive early on Sunday morning and are displayed and sold and carried away in bicycle baskets and tote bags and the arms of people who bought more than they intended because the quantity of bloom in a small space is the kind of thing that produces decisions that outpace plans. The street empties by two in the afternoon. The shops close at three. By four the street is quiet again. By Monday morning it is a residential street with independent shops and no particular reason for a visitor to seek it out, and it will remain that way until next Sunday, when it becomes again the thing that people come specifically to experience. This weekly transformation, from ordinary street to extraordinary market and back, is the thing that makes it worth visiting and worth writing about, and Cyndi Himmelstiere intends to keep writing about it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
