What's on - London

Columbia Road market is blooming luverly

The Columbia Road market in the East End is the place for cheap flowers on Sundays. Photo: Ian Collins.

One of the great things about London is its network of specialist and neighbourhood markets - and even while I mourn the lost flower stalls at Covent Garden and the fishy heaven of Thames-side Billingsgate, there is still much to celebrate.

Early of a Thursday morning may find me in the bric-a-brac market at Spitalfields, a short walk from Liverpool Street. On Saturdays I take the Tube to Notting Hill Gate for the antiques of Portobello Road or head to London Bridge for the deli delights of Borough Market.

But Sunday is special for a good old East End tradition in Bethnal Green's Columbia Road flower market. It dates from the days when local Jewish traders needed to be spared work on Saturday (and Cockneys could benefit by buying cheaply pots and blooms failing to sell at Covent Garden or Spitalfields the previous day).

Now in a street of Victorian shops off the Hackney Road, in the borough of Tower Hamlets, the enterprise was founded by philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts in 1869 as a covered food market.

The great dame funded a Gothic building with space for 400 stalls and flats above, but a planned railway for the delivery of fish was never built. The market closed in 1886 and, after serving as warehouses and workshops, the lovely structure was demolished by a philistine council in 1958.

Built on an area known as Nova Scotia Gardens, the old site had been a brick field and then a rubbish dump whose lowliest dwellings often flooded.

Here, from 1830, a gang known as the Resurrection Men stole freshly-buried bodies for sale to anatomists. They soon realised that doing in could bring quicker and easier profits than digging up.

When, in November 1831, they delivered a young male body of suspect freshness to the King's College School of Anatomy in the Strand, the police launched an intensive search of Nova Scotia Gardens.

Items of clothing found in a well and a privy supplied evidence of multiple murders and at their trial, before their hanging at Newgate, the gang leaders confessed that the telltale corpse was that of a teenage Lincolnshire cattle drover on his way to the meat market at Smithfield.

Columbia Road saw mayhem again on the night of Saturday September 7, 1940 when, at the height of the Blitz, a crowded civilian shelter beneath the market was hit by a 50kg bomb.

By then the market was falling victim to rationing rules and starting a long decline before a revival from the 1960s based on the increasing popularity of gardening programmes on radio and TV.

Now the din of Cockney traders - “FREE POTS FURRA FOIVER!” - reflects an enduring love for cut flowers and plants among East Enders, as introduced by Huguenot immigrants together with a fascination for caged songbirds.

Scores of stalls specialise in that full-bloom look which can easily fade and flag by the time you lug it home. But there are undoubted bargains - such as five good roots of cottage garden hardy perennials for £5 which the stall-keeper assured me would be perfect for “anywhere in the garden mate and any conditions”.

Now there's hardy for you - although hope and hype may in practice spring rather more eternal than these particular perennials if planted by less than green fingers.

Besides the bog standard garden staples, there are lemon trees and mimosa trees and festoons of orchids. The cut flowers seem especially cut price.

Crowds flocking here between 8am and 2pm are often swollen by camera crews, for Columbia Road is now a favourite location for fashion and film shoots.

Behind the two lines of stalls there are masses of small specialist shops, more than a few devoted to that strange cult of modern times - the big, bulky handbag. What on earth do trendy women put in there? Some could double up as body bags for the Resurrection Men.

Besides crafts and clothes and furnishings, and antiques, garden accessories and Buddhist artefacts, there are oysters for £1.50 and a brilliant array of freshly-filled bagels in Café Columbia - the local landmark made famous as an early hangout of the band The Libertines.

A traditional sweetshop stocks sherbet dabs and black jacks, and don't miss the Columbia Carrier stall - selling cheap plastic/fabric bags with a large flat base which are ideal for transporting plants.

Flowers and food seem to go together here, and after an hour of gawping and jostling my mind rises about the boarded-up corner pubs of this part renewed and part derelict district.

I find I fancy a curry - and the Brick Lane capital of Indian (or rather Bangladeshi) restaurants, is an easy 10-minute walk away providing you're not the proud new owner (as I very nearly was) of a mimosa tree.

Columbia Road market is on the 26, 48 and 55 bus routes from Liverpool Street. A handy Shoreditch High Street railway station will open next year. Traffic wardens are a London nightmare, but parking on the Hackney side of Hackney Road is free on Sunday.