The majority of my father’s photos were not dated. It is possible to work out the year that the photo was taken by looking at the notes that went with the negatives, and where an individual photo has been printed and dated from a film of 36 photos. Three photos I can date accurately are of Covent Garden, on Sunday the 9th of August, 1953:
I suspect these photos were possibly taken as competition entries at the St. Brides Institute Photographic Society, as my father was a member and did win a couple of their competitions. They seem to be more composed, and to focus on specific details rather than general photos of places.
The photos were taken around the northern side of the market building, and show piles of produce in sacks and boxes:
Along with the barrows used by market workers to move stock around:
Although my father had recorded that these photos were of Covent Garden market, I was rather unsure of the location.
In the background of the first photo the corner of a building with two street name signs can be seen.
The following extract shows the two street signs as a clip from the TIF 55MB image straight out of the scanner, so about the best I can get, given that this is from 72 year old film:
Even with the grainy image, it is possible to see the names James Street on the left and Covent Garden on the right, so I can locate the photo as being on the northern side of the market building.
In the following map, the building corner with the two street name signs is at the end of the red arrow, and the approximate location from where the photo was taken, is shown by the red circle (© OpenStreetMap contributors):
The street names seemed to provide firm proof of the location of the photo, however one aspect of the 1953 photo still concerned me. Return to the photo at the top of the post, and the pillar is in sunlight, with the shade of a lamp being cast on the pillar. If the pillar was on the north-western side of the market (you can see the orientation of the market building in the above map), could it really have been in direct sunlight, sufficient for a distinct shadow to form on the pillar?
To resolve this, I used the Shademap App.
This application displays a street map, and allows you to adjust the date and time, and the map displays how the area in shadow changes.
Using Shademap, it looked as is the photo was taken just after 4pm. At this time, the angle of the shadow cast by the sun looks as if it would cast a shadow of an overhead lamp on the pillar, with the pillar and area where the boxes and sacks are located, in sunlight.
Shademap also shows that the corner building with the street name signs would be in slight shade, which seems to agree with the photo.
So if the photo was taken just after 4pm on Sunday the 9th of August, 1953, you may well be wondering why I am featuring it for the post on the 2nd of March. It is down to my lack of organisation with posts, and featuring posts in the order of scanning the photos and an opportunity to visit the site.
To find the location of the photo, I walked to the north-western side of the Covent Garden market building. This is the view along the open space between the market on the right and the surrounding buildings on the left. You can see the pillars which line the edge of the market, one of which featured in my father’s photo:
It is difficult to be sure exactly which pillar was in the photo. The first possibility is shown in the following photo:
Two street name signs can still be seen on the corner of the building opposite, however the building is not the same as the one in the 1953 photo. The building we see today is part of the late 1990s redevelopment of the large plot, part occupied by the Royal Opera House. The street running off to the left is James Street.
I moved to the next gap between two pillars to take the following photo, which could also include the pillar in the original photo. This photo shows one of the ornamental barrows around the market which are reproductions for decoration, rather than the original barrows shown in my father’s photo:
The shadow on the pillar in the 1953 photo was presumably a lamp, and today there are still lamps lining the edge of the building above the pillars, although comparing with the 1953 shadow, they do not appear to be the same:
I find it fascinating to explore some of the details within these old photos. The following is an extract from the second of the 1953 photos:
Firstly, the sacks have the numbers 1952 on them, which I assume is a year, which would have been the year before the photo was taken. Possibly the year that the sacks were made?
Both the sacks and the boxes to the right have the name W. Medlock, which seems to have been a company that operated at Covent Garden for many years.
The first reference I found to W. Medlock was in the Bedfordshire Times and Independent on the 5th of September, 1871, in an article about the Sandy Flower and Horticultural Show.
In the list of those who were judges of flower and agricultural exhibits, Mr. W. Medlock is a judge for the Market Garden produce, and he is listed as Mr. W. Medlock, Covent Garden.
As well as being a judge, W. Medlock also exhibited produce at the Sandy show. In the 1903 show, within the category for Market Gardeners, Medlock won a special prize for a “bushel of white or red Hebron potatoes”.
W. Medlock Ltd, were a firm of potato merchants, which explains the shape of the contents of the sacks in the above photo. There are many references to them in and around Sandy, Bedfordshire, which has long been an agricultural area, and there are still growers and merchants of potatoes listed in the area.
In the 19th century, Sandy was a small market town and in the 1924 revision of the Ordnance Survey map, much of the land surrounding the town is marked as being allotments, so this was an area of market gardens.
What must have helped with linking Sandy with Covent Garden was that the town was not far from the original A1 north road, and in 1850 Sandy railway station was built, providing a rail route to London, which must have been the main method for transporting W. Medlock’s potatoes from the town to Covent Garden.
Further confirmation that W. Medlock was a potato merchant was from a very condescending article in the Daily Herald on the 16th of June, 1931:
“POTATOES GET THE SACK – CROSSED OFF MENU BY SLIMMING GIRLS. Potato sales are dropping alarmingly. The homely ‘spud’ is being despised and rejected, and women are responsible.
Through the eyes of the potato, women see the great modern bogey, Fat, and they are as much afraid of the potato as they would have once have been of a mouse.
‘Our sales have dropped by a third in the past three years’ said the manager of Messrs. W. Medlock Ltd. wholesale potato merchants of Covent Garden, to a Daily Herald representative yesterday.
Restaurants are serving far fewer potatoes than they used to because women will not eat them. Even the women who are not definitely on a slimming diet have certain taboos, and the first of them is potatoes.
‘Women are behaving very foolishly about dieting, and this potato ban is one example of their folly’ a doctor said. They are doing harm by cutting out potatoes unless they substitute something equally starchy – which they don’t.
Potatoes are good food, and it is time women learned sense about them.”
However, the only person acting foolishly was the Daily Herald reporter, as soon after the above article, the paper had to print the following apology:
“POTATO FIRM’S SALES – In our issue of June 16 we stated that the sales of Messrs. W. Medlock Ltd. wholesale potato merchants of Covent Garden ‘have dropped by a third in the past three year’.
Messrs. Medlock inform us that this is not correct. Their sales have not diminished in any way, but on the contrary, are regularly and steadily increasing.
We gladly give publicity to this fact and offer our apologies to Messrs. W. Medlock Ltd. for any annoyance the misstatement may have caused them.”
Which just goes to show that back in 1931, stories in papers about diets were just as reliable as they are today.
The name of another Covent Garden merchant, and which also demonstrates a link with the agricultural areas surrounding London, can be found by looking at one of the other 1953 photos, where boxes with the name W.J. Soper can be seen:
W.J. Soper were agricultural merchants who seem to have brought in produce from Norfolk. They were regularly mentioned in lists of merchants in Norfolk newspapers, such as the Lynn News and Advertiser, based in King’s Lynn, to the north-west of Norfolk, just south of the Wash.
A typical mention from the 14th of March, 1958 reads:
“Large quantities of King Edward and Majestic Ware potatoes, Parsnips, Red Beet, and Cabbage – W.J. Soper, Ltd. Covent Garden, Spitalfields, Borough Market, Harlow. Cheques daily or weekly as required – Local rep. W. Edwards, Tel Wisbech 1769.”
Soper’s representative was based in Wiusbech, which is a short distance to the south-west of King’s Lynn. The advert tells us a bit about how Covent Garden market operated.
Firstly, along with W. Medlock, companies such as W.J. Soper, trading at Covent Garden were buying in produce from across the agricultural lands of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, and with the location of towns such as Wisbech, this probably included Lincolnshire.
The expansion of the rail network across these counties from the 1850s must have helped considerably with the transport of agricultural produce to help feed the ever growing population of London.
W.J. Soper’s newspaper listing also mentions other London markets at Spitalfields, and Borough Market, so many companies were probably not just operating at Covent Garden, but were bringing in produce to be sold across London. The mention of Harlow is rather strange, unless they also served a market in one of the first post-war new towns being built in London’s orbit.
One other point about the photos – they were taken on a Sunday afternoon, and there is lots of agricultral produce piled up outside the main market buildings.
The market must have been closed at that time, and unfortunately the photos do not show if there was anyone who worked at the market in the surrounding area. Was there any form of security to protect these sacks and boxes from theft? If not it seems remarkable that so much could be left around the market until it opened early on Monday morning.
There is a fascinating film of Covent Garden fruit, flower and vegetable markets in operation from 1957, just four years after my father’s photo. The film starts at a farm in Sussex where produce is being loaded onto a lorry for a late night drive into London so the produce can be sold at Covent Garden. The film can be watched here:
The film mentions potatoes from Norfolk, but also demonstrates the wide geographic area that supplied produce to be sold in the market, as well as the considerable distances that produce sold at the market were transported to, so as well as being a market to supply London, Covent Garden was also supplying many businesses across the country.
The film also implies that the market was almost a 24 hour operation, with produce arriving at all times, and being sold during a set number of hours. Perhaps this explains why the sacks and boxes in my father’s photo appear to have been left unattended on a Sunday afternoon. They may have just arrived, or were waiting to be moved.
I always find it rather poignant watching these old films, as those shown working across the market had no idea of just how much the market would change in the coming decades, with Covent Garden closing as a market and relocating to Nine Elms less than twenty years after the above film.
Great sleuthing work, and as you say, poignant images from a world on the brink of change. For further glimpses of market life in Covent Garden you should try the opening of The Red Shoes (1948) and various scenes from Frenzy (1972), which is really the last gasp of the old place.
Please could you post the link for the 1957 film that you mention.
Fascinating post. Thank you.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E7GxhWUVOqw
Link to 1957 film
I don’t have a link to the film but the title is ‘Every day except Christmas’ DG.
Hi Susan, the 1957 film is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7GxhWUVOqw and you should also be able to watch it via the post on my website at https://alondoninheritance.com/london-photography/covent-garden-sunday-afternoon-9th-of-august-1953/
This is a wonderfully researched and forensic examination of images that most people would find unremarkable in themselves and boring to read about. Not me! Nor some of my family and friends, particularly those with images they are puzzling about for family history reasons. It’s the detail (potatoes, slimming, security in the early Fifties) which gives social and historic context for our ancestors beyond simply identifying who they are and where they were when the image was taken. So a big thank you for this article in itself but also for the encouragement towards making the effort to get more out of the images we have. Thanks too for the heads up on the research tools linked to in this post.
Fantastic piece of research – the wonder of technology that the actual time of a photo taken over 50 years ago can be ascertained.
Another fascinating Sunday morning article – you’ve been enriching my life for a good number of years now! I was moved to right to congratulate on finding shade map. I would never have dreamed that such an application exists FoC on the interweb. Absolutely enthralling.
Looking forward to next Sunday!
Westminster Abbey came to own Covent garden when it exchanged Windsor for it and Hyde Park and they cultivated it. With Henry V111 dissolution of the monasteries Covent Garden was given to the Russells, the first Duke of Bedford who owned and operated it. There are some very good old photos both at the market on the pillars and on London online archives.
Hi,
Reading Mr Quinn’s ” world on the brink of change” reminds me (and I think I’ve mentioned this on previous comments) of buying flowers at the Market in about 1955. My mother did free-lance wedding bouquets and we would get a very early bus to Covent Garden, work our round the various stalls buying the required flowers. In true “My Fair Lady” tradition, the sellers would call out my mum’s name “Lil!” in good old Cockney, since she was a regular buyer. There would be the costermongers loading up their barrows. I’ve still got a receipt from 1957 from one of the shops in Wellington Street that sold sundries for florists – wire, gutta percha etc.
Mum and I would then get a taxi home to Cumberland Market, since she couldn’t get everything on a bus.
I feel privileged to have seen the Market when was a working market.
Ian Gerrard
The barrows in the original photos are most likely to have been made and hired out by Ellen Keeley, member of a family who emigrated from Ireland in the 1830s and set up in Neal Street, making a fortune from hiring to Covent Garden traders. They were still (just) in business when I worked in the area in the early 1980s, while the market was transforming into the retail haven of today — though far less of a tourist-trap when it first began, before the chains took over. Keeleys also reinvented themselves as a film and TV prop hire company, still with some barrows; there’s a blue plaque to Ellen on the wall of 33 Neal Street, along with a repro street lamp. The one shadowed in your father’s photo was probably a much more utilitarian industrial lamp than the pretty “Victorian” ones installed in recent years of gentrification (even though they’ve also now become really trendy themselves for home decor, as everything is cyclical…).
I knew a man in Montgomery, Powys who went to Covent Garden after the war, helping deliver local potatoes. When they arrived, his job was to stand on the back of the truck and wave a club at thieves who were trying to pinch the spuds. He didn’t like London and lived his whole life in Powys. I imagine the photo club topic didn’t include people in the shots of the market, hence their absence.
Did you spot the names on the short film credits? Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson among them …
GREAT !
Very interesting! Good detective work!
Wonderful research!
Regarding the lamps, my guess would be that faced with a collection of lamps of probably varying ages and repairability, those doing the conversion of the market to a shopping centre probably chose to go to Suggs and get all new lamps of an authentic period pattern – those wall brackets in particular look brand new. See https://www.williamsugg.co.uk/ – my guess is that the new lamps are a bracket-mount version of the Windsor pattern on that page.
Looking at the shadow in your father’s picture, allowing for it being cropped on the left side by the edge of the pillar, and having the shadow of the bracket on the right side, it could have been the pattern of lamp Suggs call a Tunbridge.
A few memories of Covent Garden, or ‘the Garden’ as it was known, from the 1960’s, with regard to today’s excellent post. Firstly, a gentle correction. Produce from the Home Counties, including the potato growers of Bedfordshire, would never had been ‘trained’ into central London, lorries always being used for that purpose. The reason for this was simple, plain economics. Arrival by train at say Paddington, King’s Cross or Waterloo would have involved first taking said produce to the nearest train station to the grower by lorry, loading it onto a train, then unloading it onto another lorry once it had arrived at one of the London terminals. Double-handling you see. Then there were the ‘returns’ to consider, the empty wooden boxes that had to be returned to the growers to be reused the following week, or whenever, and on which a deposit had been paid (the ones in the picture had 5/- marked on the side, indicating five shillings or 25p). This also applied to those potato sacks, the deposit on those probably being just a shilling. Those delivery lorries, once unloaded, had to be away from the market by 4am at the latest, after which the smaller buyers’ vans used to besiege the area. The congestion was horrendous – the main reason that the market eventually moved out to Nine Elms – and once loaded those vans often could not get out, in which case the owner would pay a ‘mover-upper’ a shilling or two to move his vehicle up the queue as and when he could; a single mover-upper often being responsible for moving up nine or ten vans in a row. Once the van was near the top of the queue, aiming to get out into Long Acre or the Strand, depending, the mover-upper would then send word to the owner, who would be in whichever caff, or pub!, he chose to be in. Incredible as it sounds, a few old boys made a reasonable living out of providing such a service. The post mentioned security. With lorries arriving from early afternoon to unload, the untended produce often left literally on the pavement, security was provided by the market beadles, whose very presence always seemed to deter even petty theft. The beadles also ensured that trading was carried out only in the hours permitted under the market’s charter, no trading whatsoever on a Sunday for instance, although deliveries continued through the Sabbath ready for the Monday morning, meaning 5am, rush. Lastly, those days were not always as romantic as sometimes portrayed. Those two ladies sitting on a barrow tying up small sprigs of ‘lucky’ heather, for example, used to hunt in packs of three or four at a time, usually in Regent’s Street, preying on any gullible-looking tourist that crossed their path. Once the heather was in his hand it was not unusual to see two of then haranguing a ‘punter’ into getting his wallet out while forcefully crying out ‘Not enough; not enough’ and when necessary ‘extracting’ the pound notes from the now open wallet themselves. The weekly fines were regarded as simply a business expense, to be paid and then get back out to their lucrative trade. The three-card-trick boys carried on inexactly the same manner, but that’s another story . . . .
This article is fascinating in its own right, but the photos also appear to confirm the presence of the “Tunbridge” style of lamp on the exterior of the main market building, as Greg surmised above:
https://flashbak.com/how-they-nearly-destroyed-covent-garden-20304/
I also remember taking the recommendation of a market beadle for a suitable pub that served food, to go to before seeing a show nearby one evening, in the long-distant days before the whole area was wall-to-wall restaurants and bars; a very different world.
I worked out of an office just round the corner in Kingsway in the early sixties. The area around Covent Garden was ideal for me to park my car since parking meters were not established around there. But it was crucial to slip thirty bob to one of the porters otherwise it was highly likely a sack truck would ”accidentally”
rundown the side of your car. The area was heaving with activity and noise from the traders. A wonderful place to see and smell.
Another superb posting. Looking at the detail of the the photos is fascinating.
Listed in my 1948 London Post Office directory:
Medlock W. (London) Ltd. Potato salesman. 464 & 465 North Row Covent Garden Market WC2
(TA ‘Packhouse’ TEMple Bar 5365) & 36 L7NER Rail;way Potato Market, York Wat N1, & 1 & 2 Kings St WC2
And
Soper Wm. Jas. Vegetable salesman. Spittalfields Market, E1. BIShopsgate 5227.
I am Hoxton born and bred and share your father’s and your love of this still great city. Older images are effectively a window into our past especially as the scale of change increases, driven by the insatiable hike in land value and the increasing rarity of building plots. I’m not quite sure if you get value from these postings but I confess I enjoy them and their pedantic detail very much.
I walked through Covent Garden flower market to my office over a potato warehouse in Neal Street in 1958/60s.
My future husband was a policeman at Bow Street. If he was on late turn he would sometimes escort me to the station (railway!!). We would get a few comments and whistles from the friendly porters.
He sadly died recently. We were married for sixty-three wonderful years. This post and film brought back very happy memories.
Thank you for your very interesting articles, I look forward to reading them every week.
I wonder if Ray would be happy to contact me directly? There is a Bow Street Police stn newsletter that deals with stories and people from the 60’s 70’s 80’s etc that she may like to receive if she doesn’t already. Or I can pass the email address of the editor on to her.
Thanks for the wonderful and interesting post today
Nice to see the buildings preserved just a tourist trap now.