London Diaries: How to keep things alive

Blokes, bouquets and bad taste at Columbia Road Flower Market

Back in my younger days, when a corona was just a beer and I still harboured hope that some time soon I would fall into my true career calling as a style and fashion guru, I lived in east London. Cool people lived in east London. Cool people live in east London. I no longer live in east London.

But I go back there occasionally, to the bits where the cool people hang out, to see what everybody is wearing and, on this particular Sunday, to buy some plants. There’s one street in east London that’s particularly well suited to both of these tasks: Columbia Road.

There’s been a market in Columbia Road since 1869, when it was covered and sold food. But now every Sunday from 8am you can find the busiest flower market in London. Here you can find your next cheese plant or your next bunch of petunias, but you can also find people wearing outfits that make Grayson Perry look shy and retiring.

---

Because you may come to Columbia Road ready to be dazzled by the daffodils, but spend any more than five minutes shuffling between the stalls (and if you come anytime after nine, shuffling is what you'll do, this market is standing room only) and your gaze will rest on the people instead.

It’s difficult to tell, looking around, whether you are, as you suspect, at least four years behind the times when it comes to what is fashionable these days, or whether that, on this cold autumnal morning, everyone got dressed in the dark.

The conclusion that’s easy to come to after a morning’s shuffle among the petunias is that it’s a little bit of both. Yes, some of your fellow market goers may have picked each item of clothing more or less at random out of their wardrobes, and donned them without a moment’s thought, but that’s because they are east Londoners and east Londoners are cool. You name the fashion trend you thought was dead and it's here. Flares? Sure. Socks and sandals? Here they are worn earnestly - it's cold.

I sneak around in my skinny jeans, an item of clothing that I have been assured many times by many people went out of fashion some time between the wars. Yet here I am, still wearing them.

This is partially because I am cheap and the time to buy new clothes for myself isn’t the start of a new season or range, it's when my current pair of jeans announces that it is about to become my former pair of jeans by stretching a hole in its fabric, usually and inexplicably, on the backside. But also partially because I spend much more time in west or central London than I do in east. There are well dressed people in west or central London, sure, but there are also lots of tourists. It’s easy to look at least vaguely fashionable when your main competition is wearing windbreakers and nylon trousers.

---

Though not everyone is fashionable at the market. Every good market needs good vendors, and Columbia Road has some of the best. Those selling plants here are sometimes second or even third generation vendors, and they know their plants.

“Give her a drink every seven to ten days,” one says as he hands a plant to L. that will soon be coming home with us. He says this in the inevitable cockney accent that comes as standard with any London market seller over a certain age. His fellow market seller is dressed, despite temperatures in the single figures, in a white t-shirt and a pair of shorts.

He may be no fashion guru but he is a bloke, and, to a man, these market sellers are blokes. They know a lot of information about pruning your petunias, and they who wouldn’t be out of place discussing the vagaries of certain refereeing decisions over a few pints later in the afternoon. 

One gives me the full sale treatment, pointing to some of his smaller cheese plants: "a few of these will make the inside of your house look like Miami." The prospect of my little flat in west London being filled with Florida Men makes me push on down the market.

Columbia Road, or that which you can see through the haze of east London fashionistas, is all plants to one side, and all middle class boutiques and coffee shops to another. They may be contained within an old east London terraced row which has been thoroughly scrubbed up, but these are the kind of shops that sell those sort of things that you don't need but certainly want. Quite a few selling chiefly the sort of homes for your new plant children that require a London-sized deposit.

The coffee shops are standard east London fare. We queue outside one that does a particularly good lemon and poppy seed cake and I shell out seven pounds for some tea and a pastry and pretend that it hasn't deeply wounded me. 

---

Then because we're really in the spirit of things we buy some plants. I'd never considered becoming a Person Who Owns Plants - I'm not particularly adept at keeping myself alive, nor anything else really. I once inadvertently killed a goldfish I had owned for all of three weeks when I spilled an entire can of food into its bowl and neglected to scoop it out, leaving it there overnight. The next morning the food had all gone and the goldfish lay bobbing on the surface, quite dead. 

But L., thankfully for me, is the sort of person who likes to make things look nice. If it were left to me our flat would resemble a comfortable but sparsely furnished prison cell. It might have a bed and a table but anything to make it look like someone actually lives there? If it's more than a tenner, I'm not buying it.

And so we buy a Calathea and a Cheese Plant from a particularly blokey bloke, the one who refers to his plants as she's and her's and who instils the confidence no horticulture Youtuber ever could.

Because I suppose it's the peculiar combination that meets at Columbia Road Flower Market that makes it work so successfully. All the cool people go there, the people who dare to pick that hat out of the charity shop and wear it without irony or sarcasm and manage to look really quite cool. The people who stopped wearing skinny jeans when David Cameron was Prime Minister and now (figuratively) pull off trousers that end somewhere in the upper calf region.  

So by going you get to feel like one of them, the cool people, even though you would scoff at their hat and have shorts longer than their trousers. But you wouldn't spend money unless reassured that you could, really quite easily, keep some plants alive. 

Here's where the blokes come in. I don't know what it is about them, but when our bloke tells us to give our cheese plant a drink, every seven to ten days, I just know that he's right. He's the sort of man that you could call about your plumbing or your oven that's on the blink and he'd have you making roasts for a dozen in no time. 

So anytime we need plants it'll be to Columbia Road we go. I need to keep up with the trends I'm not following and I need to be reassured by a bloke wearing shorts in near-freezing temperatures that yes, I can keep this plant alive. He says I should probably lose the skinny jeans, though.

---

Some housekeeping.

If you’d like to discover more newsletters like mine, you can subscribe to The Sample, which curates the best newsletters and sends you those worth subscribing to. You can subscribe through this link. Doing so helps this blog get more readers so please do check it out.