Postcards - Borough Market & Nearby

Borough, the unremarkably named community on the southern end of the London Bridge, has a covered produce market with, apparently, rather ancient roots.  It adjoins the grounds of Southwark Cathedral

Southwark was traditionally a starting point for Christians making the pilgrimage to Thomas Becket's shrine in Canterbury, and it is pilgrims travelling from Southwark who are the subject of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. 

These days the produce market is underneath an area where a load of railway lines converge on London Bridge Station.  And so you get art installations like this ...

on the brickworks that hold up the railway lines over the streets.

Borough Market has reinvented itself in the last couple of decades and gone from a couple of fresh fruit and veg distributors who supplied commercial eateries, to an expanded area of vendors of food of all kinds and styles.  Don't be fooled - this is no Greek Laiki style market.  F seldom invests in produce from this market.  A lawyer friend of hers complained that produce was first class but he needed a second mortgage on his house to buy the ingredients for a family meal.  

F did experience a strange stroke of luck (being on the receiving end of a random act of generosity) one Friday evening though: on finding a bread vendor still packing up stall as she walked through on her way to Waterloo, she asked if she could buy one of the remaining loaves.  The vendor offered to gift some to her.  She wanted to pay, but all the money-taking gear had been cashed up.  The leftovers are normally collected by a person working for one of the charities that feeds homeless people, but had sent a message they couldn't collect that night.  F accepted one but declined a second as that would simply have been greed, only later realizing she could have been the vector by which such loaf was delivered to one of the homeless people always seen outside Waterloo Station.  When she arrived at Waterloo there were (remarkably) no homeless people and she walked inside to discover her train had been cancelled.  The train after it was cancelled too (there had been an accident on the line), so by the time she got home she had eaten half the loaf and was grateful for the gift in ways she had never anticipated.  (She later knitted some fingerless mitts for the girl on the bread stall.)

Final Friday Feature