March 4, 2008...5:44 pm
Sunday Morning Consumption Stifled.
My favourite Spring Season pastime has been stolen from me… by me. This is the first time I have been so utterly pissed off with this cashless exercise. I have always included ‘the markets’ in my reasons for living in London – especially East London. I am sure I will continue to do so but, alas, for the foreseeable future I can only spectate in the hustle, bustle and bartering.
My room is filled with things anyone could argue I didn’t really need. Picture frames who’s last owners are certainly dead, weird obsolete tools “just in case”, the list is endless. However, the market-stall purchases I have made over the years pale in comparison to the food and coffee consumed whilst browsing and socialising every Sunday morning at Brick Lane, or Columbia Road, or Broadway Market, or Spitalfields.
There is little better than strolling the back streets of these, once grotty, back streets with the new spring sun on your back with nothing but blue skies above. Celebrating the beginning to the best bit of the year with the odd impulse buy that you may never use but will certainly not regret.
Consuming unnecessary quantities of coffee and cake outside Café 1001 in order to prolong the pleasures of people watching. Observing the ‘Shoreditch Twat’ in its prime, mincing up and down as if the market was a runway – a far cry from the old days of raw East End stalls of fruit and veg’ farmers and rag’n’bone men.
Over time, the markets have changed; they have evolved into new beasts of tourism, celebrity and a showcase for fashion vagary. The only thing that is yet to evolve is the markets’ reliance on cash. I can’t buy a thing, not even a coffee – from an actual shop in a building, without cash. The markets have nothing left for me to enjoy and I feel left out. I want to buy myself something pointless, I want to meet my friends without feeling like a freeloader, I want the markets to drag themselves into the 21st fucking century.
It was only last week I was reading about a small town in Ontario that went cashless in America’s first community wide test of Smart Cards in 1997. Over 10 years ago, even a small farmhouse outside the town sold their corn through the Smart Card system. 10 years later and it is barely available outside Subway Sandwiches let alone the cosseted cheese and olive stall on Broadway Market. To me, that seems utterly illogical.
Every market has a very public problem with illegal stalls, every stall and their punters occasionally fall victim to theft and every bloody market is surrounded by (if not covered by) a permanent building or structure. When we are already living in a world with fewer and fewer wires, why on earth can’t someone pay for something with a touch of a button or a swipe of a card? I am sure it would bring more revenue to the stall-holders, more security to the market place and it would once again give me a reason to get up on a Sunday morning.
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