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Chiswick

FLOWER MARKET

Bridget Osborne looks forward to the creation of a new Flower Market in the centenary year of Chiswick’s old outdoor market

A group of residents and businesses in Chiswick has come together to set up a flower market once a month on Sundays on the site of the old Chiswick Market, in front of the row of shops between the police station (now closed) and George IV pub. We have published a business plan and set up a Community Interest Company to run it, with the Director of Abundance London Karen Liebreich, commercial surveyor Ollie Saunder and myself as co-directors. Abundance London has project managed several big community projects in Chiswick and Isleworth. We have council backing and we’re currently working through logistical issues such as licensing and traffic management with LB Hounslow. Our motivation is to try and revitalize the economy of Chiswick High Rd by making it the Columbia Rd of west London. Pre-Coronavirus, Columbia Rd flower market was normally heaving with people and trendy shops have sprung up, many of which only open on Sundays to cater for the crowds. Opening Chiswick Flower Market on the site of Chiswick’s historic market would be a brilliant way of marking the centenary of the original. Towards the end of 1919 Chiswick Market was opened, becoming established in early 1920, in response to a different economic need – men returning home from fighting in the First World War who needed an income, at a time when shops in the High Rd were too few and too expensive to meet consumers’ needs. On 20 February 1920, a correspondent who signed himself merely as ‘X’ wrote to The Chiswick Times: ‘the amount of shop accommodation in the Chiswick High-road is altogether inadequate to the requirements of the locality’. On 27 February The Chiswick Times reported: ‘At a meeting of the Chiswick Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday, Mr H Johnson presiding over a good attendance, Mr J Sander moved the following resolution: ‘That in the opinion of this meeting a municipal market for Chiswick as a permanent institution is desirable in order that the public of all classes may have full facilities for the purchase of commodities… … He believed the commodities sold there were such as to benefit the people who had “felt the pinch”, and they were not always those who were termed the working

classes, but many were of the middle class, whose earning power had not increased, through prices had gone up’. Mr Sanders lost that vote, as the members of the Chiswick Chamber of Commerce saw the market as a threat to their profits. He lost the battle but won the war, as the outdoor market continued to trade for several years until it was moved inside Linden House in 1924 and became a permanent fixture where the police station is currently. On 3 March 1920 a woman resident wrote to The Chiswick Times, giving the Chamber members something to think about: ‘Members of the Chiswick Council will do well to remember that they depend on the vote of the women, as well as that of the mere man (who never has to go shopping and make 10s go as far as a £1 would have

done in pre-war days), and when they seek re-election we women shall bear this is mind. ‘Possibly the members of the said Council have never had to stand in a queue (unless perchance at a “first night” at the theatre) in order to obtain the commonest, commodities of life, as most of us were obliged to do during the war. ‘And now, when a market is forthcoming, where a few pence can be saved, a slight compensation for the tremendous increase in the cost of almost everything in our homes, one cannot believe that they will abolish what is, and has been, a boon to many of those whose incomes are but slender’. The idea for the Flower Market predates the Coronavirus, and hopefully it will be one of the things which gets us back on our feet once it has passed. Thanks to Tracey Logan for historical research.

www.chiswickflowermarket.com @Chiswick Flowers