The Colours Of Columbia Road

Columbia Road Market has sold flowers to Eastenders since 1869, witnessing Shoreditch’s rise from shabby to chic. Jane Fulcher spent her Sunday morning exploring the Hackney institution.

You hear them first. Burly men are shouting each other down with offers of “two baaanches of daffs for a foiiver” and calling everybody “love” and “daaarlin”. Turn the corner and then you see them, with a Marlboro dangling from their mouths dropping ash on the blossoms and dirty aprons brushing the peonies. This is Columbia Road Flower Market.

It sits among the winding lanes surrounded by council estates and washing hung from balconies, a dot of colour on London’s grey map. After passing through drab and littered streets you reach a small terrace of cottage-like houses, and it is as if you have stepped out of the city and into a resort town. Small galleries nestle among gastro pubs, and delicatessens with oak floors sell olives and pesto.

The market is always crowded. Women push through, peeking over armfuls of flowers. They chat about Sunday lunches and gymkhanas, smacking their fashionable shopping bags into the packs of Japanese tourists who carry cherry blossoms and smile at the stallholders.

Children stare, bewildered, at row upon row of orchids, daffodils, and flowers they never knew existed. Bored-looking fathers buy battered prawns for their children from a shop near by and look at the women, who look at the flowers. Art students stop and take pictures of the men with hair in their ears who wrap the delicate blossoms in coloured papers and give them to customers. Young boys, hoods up, play hip-hop on their mobile phones and try to look cool while pushing past good old boys carrying roses.

“I think I’ve seen them on the discovery channel,” says Tom Kittle, a regular of the flower market, pointing to a carnivorous plant with acid-filled cups at the end of its stalks. Buckets are crammed full with tulips of all kinds – pointed, curvy, some almost black. Huge plants with dark green flat leaves sit next to tiny pots of paper-thin pink flowers and bags of sharp, blue thistles. Some flowers have been dropped and trodden into the road. Yellow petals mix with mud and fag ends under people’s feet.

February’s cold and heavy air keeps the smell of the flowers close to the crowd. It smells of summer but with an undercurrent of damp, rotting earth. A smartly dressed Indian woman, radiant in sari silks, walks past and the cloud of her perfume covers the scent of the blooms.
There, among it all, a man pushes his father in a wheelchair. The old man mumbles and groans, his eyes are dark, his head and arm move uncontrollably. His son moves him to a stall selling buckets of bulbs. Here he stops and points vaguely to the flowers, crouched and waiting in woody tubers. As his son helps him choose what blooms he will grow this season, he smiles.

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