I have always loved London’s street markets. One of my favourites is Columbia Road Flower Market in Bethnal Green. On a Sunday morning in the summer, there’s no finer place to be in our fair capital. My buddy Bruno ran a bar there and I would often pop down for a livener and chinwag with him. After his missus Jenny passed away Bruno decided to go global walkabout in search of salvation and major hallucinogenics. It seemed only natural that I should take over the bar. Geoff Deane
My buddy Bruno, who has gone walkabout, ran a hole-in-the-wall pop-up bar every Sunday in east London’s Columbia Road Flower Market. It’s a vibrant area that sees a wonderful flow of people from all over the world, as well as a core of locals. I’d pop down to see Bruno most Sundays, enjoy a sherbet or two and soak up the vibes. When the weather’s on your side, there’s no cooler spot in London to hang out.
Entertainment would be provided by old Jonnyboy Moore the busker, in his sharp suit and matching trilby, who would croon his way through a set of swing classics.”‘If you’re happy, tell your face,” he’d crack wise to the gathered crowd as the hat was passed around. Actually, there was no hat. It just made the sentence more evocative. These days it’s a Zettle machine for contactless card payments. Welcome to the new east London.
I didn’t like seeing the bar closed. It felt wrong. So I offered to run it for my friend while he was away. He said yes, tossed me the keys and so began my Sunday side hustle. During the week I’d been working on this book and a couple of film scripts. This involves spending a lot of time alone. And I’m not the kind of writer who prefers his own company. No isolated cottages in the wilderness for Mr Deane. You will never find me in the kitchen at parties. I like people, always have. So running a busy bar one day a week made perfect sense to me.
I’ve always enjoyed the interactions of London’s street markets. I still shop for food at Hackney’s Ridley Road when I can, as my late mother and grandmother had done before me. Walking around, the memories come thick and fast from every which way. As a kid, sneaking looks through the gates of the shechita, the kosher slaughterhouse, to watch the headless chickens run around like headless chickens. The colours and smells of Caribbean fruit, veg and spices. Now commonplace but then something new and wonderful. Like the sounds of Prince Buster or Bob and Marcia emanating from the record shop, they added gloriously to the life force of the area as new immigrant communities so often do. I feel so lucky to have grown up in that place at that time.
I remember the time my Auntie Bessy had a function to go to and needed a new dress. Now Auntie Bessy was a big woman. A very big woman. My kids refuse to believe me, but I swear when she eventually passed away, they had to get a JCB to lower her casket into the ground. So buying an evening dress off the peg for Bessy was a complete nonstarter. And the cost of having such a garment made, not to mention the difficulty of getting her to fittings, was also prohibitive.
Mum was gifted the task of sorting out this extraordinary wardrobe conundrum. After a period of head-scratching, something she saw on TV triggered an idea. Off we went to Ridley Road and, following some arbitrary haggling with one of the many schmutter merchants you would find there at that time, Mum returned home with a very large roll of fabric under her arm. This was delivered to a friend of hers with a sewing machine.
And so it was that several weeks later, inspired by Demis Roussos, a thirty-four-stone Jewish woman would attend a bar mitzvah wearing the world’s biggest floral kaftan. My old man said she looked like Kew Gardens had grown legs.
The Jews and Jamaicans in the market have mostly gone now. It’s mainly Asians and Africans. Different but the same. The smell of freshly baked rotis fill the air. A matriarch, stunning in her jazzy boubou, barks demandingly at the Indian fishmonger before handing over a fiver for a bag of mackerel. The place is alive in the truest sense of the word. You can feel the energy around you course through your veins. And you don’t get that at Waitrose, baby.
As a teenager, I’d had various stints working in the markets. I flogged whistles to Nigerians in Brick Lane and fly-pitched Clackers out of a suitcase. Clackers, for the uninitiated, were two solid plastic balls joined together by a small piece of string. With some practice, you could agitate the string and make said Clackers hit each other repeatedly at such a speed they would blur to the human eye. A fairly pointless pursuit, you might think. And you’d not be wrong. As an added bonus, this would also make the most annoying clacking sound on God’s green earth. I can sense you’re still not impressed. But in 1969 people had grown tired of sitting around waiting for TikTok to be invented and Clackers were all the rage.
As luck would have it, I was rather a dab hand with them and as I displayed my artistry, crowds of people would gather around and stare in wonder. I was making money hand over fist. Well, I did for a week or two. By week three, pissed-off punters were turning up with bruised and swollen forearms demanding their money back.
PUNTER: Look what they did to my f***ing arm!
ME: Did you not think to stop doing it, mate?
The scene ends with me legging it down the road, suitcase half open, Clackers rattling in the wind.
I like the early mornings at Columbia Road, seeing the market come to life. Every plant, flower and herb you can imagine being arranged into attractive displays. Traders stocking up on beigel-shaped carbs for the day at the café with the worst spelling in the entire postcode.
I pick up my sack of ice outside the Lord Nelson pub from a man with a limp, known only as Iceman. That’s the bloke, not the limp. I sling it over my shoulder and head back to the bar. I always wear a naval bib and brace for the market and at this point feel like a proper working man. Okay, so the bib and brace is by Nigel Cabourn and set me back four hundred quid, but I do look the part.
The most popular drink I sell at the bar is a Bloody Mary. After some highly enjoyable experimentation, I settled on a blend of some 19 ingredients. The customers have played their part in its evolution. An Italian woman suggested I try a splash of extra-dry vermouth. Pickle juice came courtesy of an Australian surfer dude. I had trouble buying it so I started brewing my own. And it was a Cuban couple who suggested the umami punch of a few drops of Maggi seasoning. If nothing else, film writing has taught me the value of a collaborative process.
My own masterstroke was a pinch of Greenfields Himalayan Pink Salt with Chilli and Lime and a sprinkle of smoked paprika. But keep that to yourself. All in all, it is a very palatable tipple.
I’m starting to see some of the same faces return every week, keen to start the day with their regular livener. I like that. I’ve even had American tourists seek me out following recommendations from fellow countrymen who’d visited me previously. One such chap was a giant of a man who looked like he had to be an American football player or a wrestler. He had come to the market straight from the airport to try my Bloody Marys. And try them he did. Four sunk back to back inside a minute or two, each with an added double shot of vodka. He then walked around the corner where my son Otis, who is a band manager, also shucks oysters every Sunday. He demolished a dozen of his finest bivalves in record time before returning to me for one for the road.
This was early in the morning and peak summer, when it was already scorching hot. “I expect you’ll be checking into your hotel and crashing out for the rest of the day,” I offered in the way of conversation. “No, man,” he replied, “this is a pitstop. I have to get the train to Manchester now.” My heart went out to his fellow passengers.
I serve a lot of daughters who moved to London for work whose mums are visiting for the weekend. I love them. Mum’s eager to take in everything the city has to offer in her short stint in the smoke and cannot wait to tell you all about her beautiful offspring’s career achievements. Daughter rolls eyes in the background and chugs back another Aperol Spritz to anaesthetise herself from the embarrassment.
There’s a couple in the deepest throes of young love, only she lives in Hackney and he in Brooklyn. They save and visit and only have eyes for each other and their respective airports. And a motley collection of the red of eye looking for a hair of the dog that gnawed its way through to the bone. Japanese fashion students who look a million dollars and club together to raise the funds for a communal glass of Sangria. The dealers who always pay cash and the tech startup Europeans, who prefer the Apple watch.
“Do you take card?”
“I take card, cash, jewellery, and attractive blonde children suitable for resale.”
“Can I get a vegan Bloody Mary?”
“Of course. But it will involve going somewhere else.”
“Do you have anything for someone who doesn’t drink alcohol?”
“Ketamine?”
Last Sunday a quietly spoken middle-aged Israeli chap ordered a Bloody Mary from me. He paid and left but returned a quarter of an hour later. “My father always drank Bloody Marys,” he said. “He would mix them himself in his special way. I drank my first one ever with him. After I left home, whenever I visited him, he would always make us both one. We lost my dad eight years ago. As soon as I tasted the first sip of your drink, I saw him standing there. It was the same taste. Thank you for that.” And then he turned and walked away.
Love, life, humanity. You find it in the most unexpected places.
