London has three flower markets worth knowing about, and they serve almost entirely different purposes. Knowing which one you actually want saves a wasted trip.
Columbia Road — for atmosphere and a Sunday out
Sundays only, 8am to around 3pm, in Bethnal Green. This is the one most people mean when they say "the flower market" — a single Victorian street lined with stalls selling bedding plants, bulbs and cut flowers, alongside roughly 60 independent shops. It's won Britain's Best Small Outdoor Market two years running, and it's genuinely crowded by mid-morning.
Go early, before 9am, for full stock and a street you can actually walk down. Go late, from around 2pm, if a bargain matters more than selection — traders drop prices hard in the last hour rather than pack unsold stock away. What you're buying here is the flower itself, not a considered arrangement of it — good for a loose bunch on your own kitchen table, less suited to anything that needs to travel or arrive on a specific day. Closer to how our hand-tied pieces are built than a structured design.
New Covent Garden — for serious volume and trade prices
Nine Elms, Monday to Saturday, 4am to 10am. This is the market Saints and most other London florists actually buy from — roughly 75% of the city's florists source stock here. It's wholesale by nature but open to the public on foot at no entry fee (£5 if you're driving in), and there's no minimum spend requirement, though prices and quantities are pitched at trade buyers rather than someone wanting a single bunch.
Worth it if you're planning an event, a wedding, or need genuine bulk at a fraction of retail cost. Not worth it for a single birthday bouquet — the effort-to-reward ratio only makes sense at volume, and 4am is a real commitment for one arrangement.
New Spitalfields — for bulk, without the crowds
Leyton, weekdays, midnight to 9am. The UK's highest-turnover horticultural market by volume, and the least known to the general public of the three — mostly trade, mostly industrial in feel, with the same bulk-buying logic as New Covent Garden but further east and less visited. Worth knowing exists if you're east London-based and doing your own large-scale buying, otherwise not a market that adds much over the other two for most people.
Which one is actually for you
For a considered gift or an occasion that needs to arrive somewhere specific, none of these three is really the answer — that's what a florist is for, and it's the gap The Florist Choice is built to fill: whatever's genuinely at its best that week, arranged and delivered rather than carried home on the Overground. For a Sunday out with flowers as the excuse, Columbia Road. For genuine bulk at trade prices and you're willing to get up early, New Covent Garden.
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