A Sunday Carried Home in Flowers

A bouquet makes a person wider. So does a shrub. Put enough people carrying both into a London street and walking becomes a collective exercise in botanical diplomacy.

Columbia Road's Sunday flower market has a practical consequence that photographs tend to omit: whatever looks irresistible at the stall must eventually be taken home.

This gives the market a useful seriousness beneath its colour. The plants are merchandise, not merely scenery. Someone has brought them here, arranged them, priced them and will have to deal with what remains. Behind the familiar image of a flower-filled street is the ordinary work of making a living.

For a visitor, it is tempting to treat the whole scene as a ready-made composition. Blooms supply the foreground, people supply movement, shopfronts hold everything in place. But the market is more interesting when its purpose stays visible. A purchase changes hands. A space opens on a stand. Someone weighs the appeal of a plant against the size of a room.

The destination is suddenly domestic.

These flowers are bound for kitchen tables, hallway corners and windowsills. A small tree has to negotiate a front door. A pot must fit a shelf. The apparent extravagance of the display will be broken into individual decisions about how people want to live.

That makes a flower market an unusually revealing place to spend part of a city break. Much tourism is directed towards what a place puts on show. Here, the public spectacle is connected to things that will soon disappear into private homes.

If you buy something, you inherit the final act of the story. There is the wrapping, the question of transport, the moment when the purchase no longer seems quite as compact as it did among all the others.

Then comes the journey away from Columbia Road, carrying something that needs space and care.

London souvenirs do not usually require watering. This one might still be growing when the photographs have slipped to the bottom of the phone.