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Fresh look for fruit and veg market to rival Borough
Ross Lydall17.09.09
New Covent Garden market will return to its historic role as "London's larder" under plans to redevelop the site in Battersea.
The wholesale fruit, vegetables and flower market will be opened to the public in a bid to rival Borough market.
It would be rebranded as The Garden - the name by which it is known by tradesmen - with the redevelopment funded by building hundreds of flats, designed by Lord Foster's architecture practice, alongside new market units.
An area known as The Garden Heart would be the hub of the redevelopment. This could feature a retail market, a cookery school, cafés and restaurants.
Baroness Dean, chairman of Covent Garden Market Authority, said: "We believe that The Garden will become to food what Westfield is to fashion. It is a way of forming the focal point for the food industry in London."
The scheme would add to the wider transformation of the Nine Elms area of Battersea, as it would sit alongside the proposed new American embassy and near Battersea Power Station, which is also being redeveloped.
The embassy proposals were last night given outline permission by Wandsworth's planning applications committee and will now be considered by London Mayor Boris Johnson. However, the government-backed market authority has objected to the US embassy moving to the area from Mayfair because it fears road closures caused by security alerts would cause chaos for delivery drivers.
The fruit and vegetable and flower markets moved to Battersea in 1974, allowing Covent Garden to be redeveloped as a specialist shopping and tourist piazza.
It is the country's largest fresh-produce market, with an annual turnover of £606million as it supplies hotels and restaurants in London and across the UK.
But the market authority believes the 57-acre site, near the south bank of the Thames, is overdue for redevelopment. It wants to build facilities for the 240 small traders and their 2,500 staff - but faces logistical problems of allowing them to continue trading while the five-year modernisation is carried out.
Public consultation on the outline plans will begin in November and a planning application is due to be submitted to Wandsworth council next year.
The housing would be built on 10 acres of the site now occupied by the flower market, at the Vauxhall end of the site. The new scheme consolidates both markets in one area.
The market authority is searching for a development partner to work on what would be one of central London's largest construction sites.
Reader views (1)
I've been there in past years with a friend, when I lived in London, neither of us having cars so going on foot armed with shopping trolleys, arriving not in the early hours of the morning but towards 9am when there are still a few wholesalers open for business, to buy and then stagger back home with trolleys full of Seville oranges to be made up (in my case) into marmalade to sell at a charity supporters' group stall. Buying Sevilles retail is expensive so if you are able to get to a wholesale market, then do so even if you have to share the oranges with friends.
I'm not sure about all this 'gentrification', though. By all means improve the place for the wholesalers and their customers, but to turn it into yet another trendy market for the upwardly mobile seems rather pointless to me.
- Judith, KIng's Lynn, Norfolk, UK
