New Spitalfields Market

During the summer I was running a market stall in need of a steady supply of fruit and veg and New Spitalfields became one of my regular ports of call. This is the UK’s biggest horticultural market, and Europe’s largest retailer of exotic fruit and vegetables ie. what Spitalfields proper used to sell before degradation (1970s), heroin (1980s) and twatification (2000s) kicked in. Its got little of the spectacle that Billingsgate offers, unless of course you get a kick out of watching tons of rucola being unloaded from Dutch juggernauts and then being continually threatened with death-​by-​speeding-​forklift. You want to be in the market for a good load of produce before the trip out to beside the new Olympics site at some unholy hour is justified. A few times I would fail to find what I needed here, only to get something of equal quality for the same price in Tesco — just goes to show how hard the Every Little Helps crew must push their suppliers.