On the flower market, the shouting vendors, and the particular pleasure of buying something living from a person who grew it
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — Cyndi Himmelstiere on East London markets.
Columbia Road on a Sunday morning is everything that people who complain about London say London used to be and no longer is, except that it still is, if you show up early enough and are willing to queue and have your feet stood on by a man carrying begonias. The flower market runs along a street that is otherwise very East London — independent shops, Victorian terraces, the remnants of a neighbourhood in the process of becoming expensive — and it transforms it, for three hours, into a place that smells of something that is not the city.
The Vendors
The vendors at Columbia Road are the market. They are families, mostly, who have been trading here for a generation or more, who sell with the particular directness of people who have been doing this long enough to have no interest in performing friendliness and a great deal of genuine warmth once you have earned it. They shout prices. They make recommendations. They will tell you if you are buying the wrong thing for your space, your light, your level of attention to plants, which they appear to assess instantly and accurately. I have been told twice that I should not buy a peace lily. Both times they were right.
What You Buy and Why
The things you buy at Columbia Road are not significantly different from the things you can buy elsewhere, but the experience of buying them is entirely different, which is the point of the market and the reason people keep coming. You buy from a person who grew it or who bought it from a person who grew it. You buy it on a street that smells of it, surrounded by people who are also buying it, on a Sunday morning when the rest of the city is still in bed or at the gym. It is, briefly, a different kind of morning, and the flowers last about a week and then you go back.
The Forty-Year Regulars
The best thing about Columbia Road is the forty-year regulars. The people who have been coming here since before the neighbourhood changed, who know the vendors by name and the vendors know them, who arrive with the same bag they have always used and buy the same things they have always bought. They are a living connection to the neighbourhood that existed before any of us arrived, and they are very fast at the market, which is what forty years of practice produces: a certainty about what you want and a complete absence of browsing. I try to get out of their way and sometimes succeed.
Why I Keep Coming
I have asked myself, on the way home with flowers, why I keep coming to Columbia Road when I could order the same flowers online and have them arrive without the early alarm and the crowds and the man with the begonias. The answer, every time, is the same: because the street, on a Sunday morning, is alive in a way that a delivery cannot replicate, and because the flowers feel different when you have chosen them from a stall and the vendor has told you how to keep them and you have walked home with them in the cold. The city is full of things you can have without going out. The things worth going out for are the ones that can only happen in a place.
For more from Cyndi Himmelstiere on East London markets, visit Cyndi Himmelstiere. London markets at Time Out London.
The market works as an antidote to the version of London that is all screens and delivery apps and the assumption that what you need will arrive without you having to go anywhere or talk to anyone. This version of London is very convenient and entirely bloodless, and Columbia Road is its opposite: inconvenient, embodied, requiring you to be present in a specific place at a specific time with enough physical space to navigate a crowd of people all carrying flowers. The inconvenience is the point. The things that require you to show up in person and wait and be jostled and make eye contact are the things that remind you that the city is made of people and that the people are, on balance, worth the inconvenience they cause.
I always buy too much at Columbia Road. I arrive with a considered list and a budget and I leave with more than either contained, because the market makes abundance feel reasonable and the vendor who adds three extra stems to your bunch because you were polite makes generosity seem like the normal condition. These are the effects of a good market on a Sunday morning: the loosening of the grip on the careful plan, the willingness to be delighted by something you were not looking for. The flowers are good too.
The market also functions as a weekly reminder that commerce can be convivial. The transaction at Columbia Road is never purely transactional; there is always a word exchanged, an opinion offered about the durability of the tulips or the proper care of the eucalyptus. This conviviality costs nothing extra and is not available in any format that does not involve being there in person.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
