Columbia Road Market
Today it’s possibly the East End’s best-loved market - so popular is Columbia Road flower market that it’s near-impossible to move around the area on a Sunday morning - and don’t even think of bringing the car. The irony is that this gem of a market owes its existence to a failed act of philanthropy 150 years ago, by Angela Burdett-Coutts.
Angela Burdett was born in 1814, granddaughter of Thomas Coutts, one of the two brothers who founded Coutts Bank. On the death of Thomas’s wife, an endowment of two million pounds went to the young Angela. She was now England’s wealthiest woman and the recipient of numerous offers of marriage. But although the young heiress would throw lavish parties at her Highgate estate, Holly Lodge, at which Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens were among the guests, her main interest was philanthropy. Pausing only to change her name to ‘Burdett-Coutts’ (which required a Royal Licence), she set about doing good.
Angela’s roll call of causes was remarkable, everything from cotton gins for Nigeria, to drinking fountains for dogs, from lifeboats in Britanny to a statue of Greyfriars Bobby in Edinburgh. But one of her main concerns was sustainable help for the poor: the far-sighted and financially astute heiress wanted endowments that would keep on giving. So she financed a sewing school for women in Spitalfields, projects for housing the poor, childcare schemes and the Columbia Market.
Burdett-Coutts, who by now was taking an active role in running the family business, saw the problem for East Enders of getting fresh food: London markets had to pay tolls, forcing up the price of the goods. In 1864, she donated £20,000 for the building of Columbia Market in Bethnal Green, which would both provide jobs for local people and supply affordable and nutritious produce. It was a huge Victorian Gothic pile, with room for 400 stalls, shops around and flats above the shops - homes for the traders. The new market replaced an older collection of street stalls, but the ambitious project never made money. It was relaunched as a fish market, with cheap fish coming in from the then-thriving east coast ports. That plan, though, depended on a new railway line coming out of Bishopsgate station (another white elephant that never really found its feet), but planning objections saw the new line shelved. In 1886, Columbia Market shut for good.
The old building was converted into warehouses and small workshops, with a local industry of cabinet and furniture making springing up. The street market, meanwhile, stumbled on into gentle decline as most of the traders decamped to the bigger Petticoat Lane market around Middlesex Street. With the number of Jewish traders, who couldn’t work on the Saturday Sabbath, an Act of Parliament was enacted to allow Sunday trading. The weekday market faded away, and Columbia Road started to specialise in plants and cut flowers, with Covent Garden and Spitalfields traders clearing their Sunday leftovers. A reorganisation of the market in 1927 gave traders specific pitches, but the Dig for Victory campaign of World War Two, when gardens were turned over to fruit and vegetable production, nearly saw Columbia Road off. And post-War, traders would turn up as and when they thought it was worth it, with the market becoming very seasonal.
The rebirth started in the 1960s, with a rule that traders would lose their pitch if they didn’t turn up for four weeks. The market started buzzing again, and the renaissance of interest in gardens in the eighties and nineties, fed by programmes like Ground Force, saw a whole new generation of Brits getting digging. Now the market was heaving every Sunday. Today, with its coterie of trendy shops, garden accessory stores, cafes and pubs it’s unrecognisable from the motley setup of decades ago.
As for Angela Burdett-Coutts, she did finally marry, though not to one of her acquisitive young suitors. She tied the knot in 1881, at age 67, amazing everyone by marrying her 27-year-old secretary, the American William Lehman Ashmead Bartlett, MP for Westminster. The shocks for Victorian society continued, as the young American adopted the surname Burdett-Coutts. But Angela had forgotten, or ignored, one of the key terms of her grandfather’s will, that the beneficiary must never marry a foreigner. A bitter battle ensued with her sister Clara, who wrested a large chunk of the endowment from Angela. Nonetheless, on her death in 1906, Angela was still enormously wealthy and still giving money to charity. Her legacy lives on, in rather altered form, every Sunday in Columbia Road.