Columbia Road Flower Market

Columbia Road was not always a place of blooms and fragrance. Before the nineteenth century, the path served as a route for driving sheep toward the slaughterhouses of Smithfield. Later, the area became known as Nova Scotia Gardens, a site infamous in the eighteen thirties for a gang of criminals called the Resurrection Men. These men gained a gruesome reputation for robbing graves to supply medical schools with bodies for dissection. The land was later cleared of this reputation and redeveloped into the Victorian shop-lined street you see today.