Flowers for thought: The blooming impact of Columbia Road 

On a weekday, wander down to Columbia Road, Bethnal Green, for shuttered shops, redbrick houses and cobbled streets.

On a Sunday, stumble, push, force – fight – your way onto Columbia Road for overflowing bins and throngs of pricey flowers.

Columbia Road Flower Market is a weekly floral explosion on a Sunday morning. Acclaimed for its chunky sunflowers, dried bloom tufts and £6.70 pints, the market is unparalleled in popularity. Whether a flower-fan or not, walking – rather, pushing – down Columbia Road on a Sunday, with a cactus and a latte in hand, will look great on your Instagram. And after a pandemic-induced hiatus, the market is witnessing a resurgence – locals, hipsters and tourists are back with welly.

Despite a recent boom in footfall providing business for the area, Columbia Road’s budding success is challenging its very own community.

Holly, an engagement consultant, has lived on Columbia Road for a year. Despite her address being the envy of many, every week, she is disturbed by the market. She said: “[The market] started off as a novelty. Then it wore off after a while, just because I’ve been through it so many times now – you can’t move when you’re walking down it.

“Even though it’s a quiet street, there are always people outside. [My Sunday] involves me avoiding the market and walking around to get to other places,” she said.

COVID-19 restrictions triggered the implementation of a one-way system, reducing the crush. Though this has since been removed, resulting in various flows of pedestrian traffic, whereby visitors often walk shoulder-to-shoulder during peak hours.

With so many visitors – and so many places to purchase coffee, cakes and sandwiches – large volumes of litter are left behind on market day. Holly said: “There is rubbish everywhere – coffee cups are left on our wall, and people stand in our doorway as well. But, if you go down the market, there’s not really anywhere [to put your rubbish], so you do end up littering – there are not enough bins.”

Yet by 7pm, this all changes: Columbia Road – pulsating with visitors just hours before – is desolate. Tower Hamlets Council rubbish trucks trawl the street, bins are emptied and pavements power washed – every sign of neighbourhood destruction is rinsed away.

Holly told me: “The council are also very good at coming and cleaning all the rubbish up – so that’s really good that they do that. But I don’t feel it shouldn’t have to be done by people coming out on a Sunday to clean up other people’s mess.”

Despite this weekly clean-up, the environmental impact of the market still hangs in the air throughout the week. Take a weekday walk along Columbia Road and you’ll see public litter thrown on private property that was missed by the Sunday-SOS truck.

Holly admits that, although Columbia Road causes her some disturbance, she does enjoy living nearby. Occasionally she will venture onto the market for a coffee, some flowers or a drink in the pub.

However – despite creating a universal local disturbance – not all locals are able to reap its rewards. Holly told me: “There is a certain type of demographic that can come and buy £15 sunflowers. It’s just not inclusive of the whole community, especially of how diverse this community is.

“You’ve got this juxtaposition: a really nice sunny day with people laughing, alongside people begging – which is heartbreaking – all whilst people are there with their nice sunflowers. It’s not their fault – you’re there to support local traders, and I think that’s a good thing… But obviously there’s a sense of guilt,” she said

Tower Hamlets is the most deprived borough in London – an estimated 44% of households live in income poverty (those earning below 60% of the median UK income). This is twice the national average (22%) and the highest rate across all local authorities in England and Wales.

Having experienced a spill of hipster-culture from trendy Shoreditch, Columbia Road’s surroundings are changing rapidly. This means that Bethnal Green features an eclectic mix of cultures and incomes: towering council flats shadow over million-pound houses on cobbled streets, and Starbucks neighbours a chicken-shop.

The flower market, whereby a ‘cheaper’ bunch of flowers will cost you well over a fiver, is obviously not affordable for all local people. “A lot of people see this as a mark of gentrification of the area,” said Holly.

“This road doesn’t really cater for the community – or maybe it does now. I don’t know, maybe [the middle class] are now the majority community here,” she told me.

Columbia Road Flower Market, the poster-girl for East End gentrification, is also supercharging housing price hikes. By putting the area onto the Instagram map, landlords are realising that they can charge excessive amounts for local property. According to RightMove: “Properties in Columbia Road had an overall average price of £680,000 over the last year. The majority of sales in Columbia Road during the last year were flats, selling for an average price of £487,500. Overall, sold prices in Columbia Road over the last year were 9% up on the previous year [2021].”

This is translating into the renting market, too. Most locals in the surrounding area live in rented accommodation, and have recently experienced steep hikes in prices. Holly said: “[gentrification] is definitely having a knock on effect on everything – it’s all feeding into pricing everyone out of the area, I think. We’ve struggled to keep up with the price of everything around here. So on top of this, the [rent] increase has been too much.

“I think [our landlord] is putting up our rent by about £500-£600 –  it’s completely unaffordable. I get that housing demand is high, but our wages aren’t rising. Living standards are the lowest they’ve ever been,” she told me. Unfortunately, many local tenants have experienced similar issues; tenants come and go from the area frequently, as they struggle to keep up with rising prices. This large turnover of residents is damaging a sense of community and fostering a sense of hostility.

Holly said: “I think there’s probably a lot of hostility in the communities at the moment, especially between people who have lived here their whole lives, and private tenants coming in and out. I think there isn’t a community when it’s private, rented tenants. It’s not possible. There’s just people coming and going all the time.”

East London’s face has already become largely unrecognisable to those who have lived there for a lifetime, and Columbia Road is no exception. Holly has already witnessed this in the short time she has lived there, and its impact concerns her. “I wonder what [the elderly community] would think of Colombia Road right now. On a Sunday, [Columbia Road] would be completely overwhelming,” she tells me.

Columbia Road Flower Market is a success for local vendors, cafes and shops – and that should be celebrated. But gasping at a £17 orchid, handing over a twenty (with instruction to keep the change), and tossing the remains of a £4 coffee onto the pavement, is a manifestation of what’s happening to the area.

Feature image credit: Mia Lyndon