I opened my first fruit and veg shop in Spitalfields in 1805…

At least that is how it feels to me because my 1790’s tiny London townhouse plus shop started selling Kent cabbages and Irish potatoes during the Napoleonic Wars and the year of the Battle of Trafalgar. While Nelson was gunning the French, we were selling onions the size of cannonballs.

My shop is right opposite Spitalfields Market, now full of chic shops and funky stalls, but formally the fruit and veg market for London, just as Covent Garden was the flower market, Smithfield the meat market, and Billingsgate, the fishmarket.

Spitalfields – named after the Priory hospital for lepers that stood on the market site in the Middle Ages – was outside the old city wall, and something of a lawless land. The costermongers who carted their veg in from Essex and Kent were known for fighting and thievery, and when the Intoxicating Liquor Act was first introduced in 1872, market taverns were available to avoid restricted opening hours.

When I first came to Spitalfields, The Ten Bells pub was still an all-nighter, and about four in the morning, when the market was in full swing loading up for the coming day, the place was packed with night-workers. Tarts off-shift used to come in for a gin and a bag of veg. Market porters had a pint of beer and a round of figs. It was strange, because among the drunk, the destitute, the damned, the disguised celebrities, con-men and crooks, were the market men who always seemed to bring their fruit and veg with them. There was one who drank Guinness and ate raw onions. He said it was better than antibiotics.

No one who lived round the market when Spitalfields was slummy and hard-working paid for fruit and veg. And the endless tramps building fires from chucked pallets, roasted potatoes in tins and made mish-mash soups from anything going.

The market has moved out to Nine Elms now, and the pyramids of oranges, gassed lemons, King Kong-size bananas, forests of...