New Covent Garden Market is the most magical of melting pots where a myriad different people gather with just one common thread: their appreciation of flowers. From Cockney wholesalers and porters to the Essex and Kent family market gardeners; from the grandest of Home Counties ladies, accompanied by their drivers, to the toughest, shrewdest stall holders from second-generation immigrant stock. Engaging and eccentric, they together make up the inimitable and unique People of the Flower Market. 

This wonderful photographic record of the last year at the site of the New Covent Garden Flower Market, occupied since the 1960s before it moved to its new, more modern premises, captures the essence and heart of what makes a market: its amazing product ­– the exuberant blooms and foliage  – along with the different characters that bring it life as they work there or visit it, as sellers and buyers and porters meet, trade, hustle and bustle, and share a joke.  Simon Lycett has bought flowers for his floristry business from this Market for over 30 years, and it has become an essential, and much loved, part of his daily life. The market traders have become like family. Each day there, throughout the year, is different, as the ever-changing seasonal flowers and foliage of spring, summer, then autumn and finally Christmas arrive in the Market hall.

New Covent Garden Market plays an integral part in Simon’s life as a florist and has done for the last 25 years. It moved to the Nine Elms site in Vauxhall in November 1974, where it became known as the New Covent Garden Flower Market. Previously it occupied the Covent Garden site since 1670 when King Charles granted the Earl of Bedford a private charter to hold a market there every day except Sunday and Christmas Day. Now after more than 40 years at the site, it has moved further down Nine Elms Lane to a new purpose build site ready to face the challenges of a 21st century flower trading market.

Simon Lycett’s TV career started with the flowers for ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’; he has appeared countless times on ‘The Alan Titchmarsh Show’ and alongside Mary Berry in her BBC1 series ‘Classic Mary Berry’. Simon has travelled the world in order to co-present a BBC2 documentary ‘The World’s Biggest Flower Market’ and he is filmed annually by the BBC from the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Simon is a member of the RHS House Plants & Cut Flowers Advisory Group which helps and advises the RHS and impacts its overall activities.  Simon is a passionate devotee of the New Covent Garden Flower Market and helps to raise the profile of British floristry and seasonal flowers. Simon was voted the Florist of the Year by New Covent Garden Flower Market in their inaugural awards. Simon had the honour of being awarded Honorary Fellowship status from the Institute of Professional Florists.

Michelle Garrett is an Australian award-winning professional photographer who is interested in all aspects of observing and capturing ‘a moment in time’.  Her love of photography has enabled her to travel extensively, work with people and their passions and have her features published in prestigious magazines and books in the UK and internationally. She specializes in garden, flower and close-up, lifestyle, food, travel, people and street photography.