Flowers and model tenements

Our first Sunday in London we took a trip to London's East End, historically the city's poorest, working-class neighborhood. What we found when we got there was a vibrant flower market along a stretch of narrow Columbia Road, the vendors all but hidden behind drifts, sprays, and bunches of flowers and plants of all colors, textures, and sizes. The flower-men and women, actually mostly men, were hawking their plants at high volume in really terrific regional British accents that I will not attempt to identify. Each Sunday the Columbia Road flower market literally fills the street for a good five blocks, leaving barely any room to pass two abreast between stalls. A flea market spilled off onto the side-streets of the flower market, with vendors selling vintage clothing and shabby-chic knick knacks that seemed to be attracting London's hipsters- I could have been in Brooklyn! Framing this lively scene were unbroken ranks of 1860s brick row houses, each one barely bigger than an American suburban garage, but with cheerful polychrome brickwork and decorative lintels and cornices. These row houses were built for working-class people, but are now home to creative-looking boutiques, artisanal bakeries, coffee shops and the like. Leaving the flower market, reluctantly, we walked a few blocks to visit a set of "model" tenements that were planned and constructed in the 1870s by a group of progressive architects and philanthropists aiming to build better designed, more sanitary working-class housing... and thus to alleviate the condition of the poor and contribute to their general "moral uplift." The design of these five-story brick and stone tenements was innovative because each apartment ("flat," to use the English) was accessed via an exterior stairway with iron balcony-landings at each story. This meant more fresh air for tenants, less direct contact in dank, airless hallways (and so less chance of spreading contagious diseases such as cholera, typhus, and yellow fever), and greater fire safety because each apartment was separated by brick, not wood, partitions, and the exterior stairways were brick. By the 1890s, tenements identical to this one had been constructed in Brooklyn.