Down my street: Lyndall Stein
It’s probably faster to shop on the internet, and probably cheaper to go to the supermarket, but down my street – The Cut, I can drink in history – my own and others. I have lived by the Cut for nearly 30 years. When I first lived here, by my door, was a vegetable stall run by Bob and his sister Violet, Bob pulled his stall by hand from his lockup, down by old the wholesale market in the Borough , not then the fashionable ‘foodies’ frenzy it is now, but an ancestor of the traders who have been there, outside Southwark Cathedral for hundreds, perhaps a thousand years.
Bob and Violet were the last vestiges of the three hundred market traders, or costermongers, that lined the Cut, and are so vividly described by Mayhew is his wonderful work London and the Working Poor. Further down the Cut in Lower Marsh are the last few stalls of that once thriving market, just a few traders clinging on, and one has two slightly younger men, (one a rather cute blonde), who sell vegetables, nowadays brought in by a white van, but still weighed out into brown paper bags, no plastic nonsense, still a sense of place, a memory of who you are, they are always ready for a chat, a laugh, a chance for you and them to meet as humans, and sometimes on a rainy Monday, a chance for them to decide not to bother to open up, which is what happened when I went out for my potatoes this week – can’t say I blame them, it was one of those days that give Mondays a bad name.
Lyndall Stein
