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COLUMBIA ROAD • JOHANNA NEURATH
East London Photo Stories Book 6
£12.95 ISBN 978-0-9576998-3-0
6
COLUMBIA ROAD JOHANNA NEURATH
columbia road
columbia road by Johanna Neurath
Book One I’ve Lived in East London for 86½ Years Book Two East London Swimmers Book Three A Portrait of Hackney Book Four Shoreditch Wild Life Book Five One Day Young in Hackney Book Six Drivers in the 1980s Book Seven Columbia Road
To order books, collector’s editions and signed prints go to:
www.hoxtonminipress.com
East London Photo Stories Book Six
INTRODUCTION The stallholders know me there now – I'm that crazy lady who takes pictures of the gutters of Columbia Road Flower Market once the worst of the crowds have gone. I get in their way as they pack up – they're eager to get everything tidied away into their vans before going off to the pub or home for their Sunday late lunches. During the week the flower traders have their pitches scattered throughout London: for example Chapel Market, at the Angel not far to the North, but also elsewhere to the South and to the West. Every Sunday except for Christmas and New years they head East and congregate on this short little street off the Hackney Road. Once the stalls are set up they excercise their lungs, trying to outdo their neighbours double entendres and sales patter in both volume and quality. For more than ten years and more or less every Sunday come rain or shine (rain makes for nicer photographs) I've been wandering down my favourite East End street camera in hand to record the riot of colour and pattern left on the ground. The visuals are almost edible. Petals, leaves, old fag butts, polystyrene tea cups are kicked, trampled and squashed into a delicous street salad. And once everything's been sold or tipped out onto the ground for the scavengers to quarrel over, the flower buckets hold a tasty soup of the day – my favourite being pale pink cherry blossom spiced with that acid yellow mimosa. I love the chaos, the sounds and the smells – a heady intoxicating mix. There's the fresh and sharp christmas pine in the winter, daffodils in the spring, summer mimosa and lavender, and the pungent herb stall all year round. Tempting smells of beer from The Royal Oak or The Birdcage – the two pubs that sandwich the parade of flower stalls.
Things have changed a bit – not much but a bit and the twenty-first century is making it's presence felt. When I first started taking these photographs the road was cobbled – it was a popular film location for period dramas for the pictureseque cobbles, the London brick one up two down houses and the original Victorian streetlamps – everything is mostly still intact except for the road now resurfaced with macadam asphalt and speed bumps. The shops have changed and adapted. Lee's seafood now sells organic sausages with rocket leaves in a ciabatta bun; the taste of whelks and cockles I guess not popular enough with contemporary punters or continental tourists with sophisticated palates.
Columbia Road First Edition Copyright Š Hoxton Mini Press 2015. All rights reserved. All photographs Š Johanna Neurath Design and sequence by Johanna Neurath and Hoxton Mini Press Series design by breadcollective.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-910566-01-5 First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by Hoxton Mini Press No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Printed and bound by: RRD, China To order books, collector's editions and signed prints please go to: www.hoxtonminipress.com