Bank holidays mean free parking at Covent Garden Market in the heart of the West End, a market that for many years has attracted sellers from all over the country on a Monday starting at five o’clock in the morning. With only antiques on this particular day and with the added bonus of no congestion charge and free parking it just makes a visit worthwhile.

If you have ever been up at five in the morning you will know just how many people are about, there seems to be a whole community of people from casino pit bosses to an army of night cleaners all making their way to or from work .At this time there is more of a feeling of ease and space as if the great machine hasn’t woken up yet and everyone is tip toeing around trying not to wake it up prematurely.

Having been selling antiques for twenty years in London markets I consider myself some what of an expert in what sells in which market and bank holiday only spells one thing, northerners on a day trip with fifty four pence and a few green shield stamps to spend, yikes !

By eleven o’clock they are flooding into the plaza for free entertainment and to eat their pack lunches of compressed meat and margarine topped of with a carton of um bongo, Why is it when they enter a foreign city northerners reach for the most ridiculous sounding carton of drink that they have never drunk before apart from on previous daytrips? .

Once they have tired of someone spinning on their head or trying to escape from a barrel in the plaza they wander down to the antiques market where me and others like us are trying to make a living in a very expensive city selling antiques.

what we get is a deluge of ridiculous questions and only genuine excitement when they see you selling something they have sitting on their mantle piece or in the attic.

You can spot them a mile off they quizzically come up to your stall and ask how much an item is worth. They giggle and holler like only northern women can do when they realise they can trade their new found treasure in for more time wasting daytrips.Empty observations of a fairground nature.

If only they realised their back door was already staved in and their collectables were making their own way down to London in the back of a ford transit. Unceremoniously knocked out at a car boot sale up the mile end road, god bless em.

If they come back in a couple of weeks time they might even see it here.

The End

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