London’s Prettiest Market Was Started By England’s Richest Woman

In 1837, Angela Burdett-Coutts became England’s wealthiest woman.

Her banker grandfather Thomas Coutts died, leaving the 23-year-old Angela Burdett-Coutts an endowment of £1.8 million.

Angela Burdett-Coutts refused to give any money to her suitors who were after her money, although she did host grand bashes in which Dickson, Gladstone, Disraeli and even Queen Victoria were invited as her friends, but her true passion was her generosity, and she gave money to hundreds of causes, at home and abroad.

She opened Ragged Schools, helped workers out of the sex trade, placed disadvantaged boys into the Royal Navy and helped soldiers in the Crimean War. She even helped set up the RSPCC and worked for the RSPCA.

In 1871, Queen Victoria made Angela Burdett-Coutts a peer, she was the first woman to ever accept the honour.

It’s almost impossible to calculate how many good causes obtained help from this extraordinary woman, and often her account entries just recorded the sums and the description ‘donation’.

She carried out a great deal of development work in poverty-stricken areas of east London, and in the mid-1800s, Bethnal Green was a notorious pigpen.

Angela Burdett-Coutts purchased land and founded the Columbia Market Buildings, designed by architect Henry Darbishire. It was a splendid, covered market in the style of a shopping cathedral.

The idea was to supply employment and homes for local people and provide East Enders with cheap and healthy produce.

The market was a monumental Victorian Gothic pile, with space for 400 stalls, surrounded by shops, and quarters for the vendors to live above the shops, and it was a hugely ambitious undertaking, but without a decent railway link, and the plan line out of Bishopsgate station never emerging, and with the competition from Billingsgate and other established London Markets, the Columbia Market failed to make money, so it closed in 1886, but Angela Burdett-Coutts also concerned herself with improving accommodation in the East End, and spurred by Dickens, she also built the U shaped Columbia Dwellings, of several levels, with a three-tier Gothic arch built into the brickwork of the main section.

Sadly none of these Coutts buildings survives today and were replaced by Sivil House and Dorset Estate in the 1960s.

However, Columbia Market’s fortunes changed with a move from Saturday trading to Sunday, giving Jewish merchants back their Sabbath, which meant that vendors from Convent Garden and Spitalfields started bringing their weekly leftovers to Columbia Road, and the market then began to specialise in plants and cut flowers.

The second world war saw Columbia Market struggle again, but a new rule in the 1960s whereby retailers would lose their stalls if they failed to show up regularly injected some much-needed vibrancy into the street, and when gardens became trendy again in the 80 and 90s, thanks to Ground Force, interest in the market flooded.

Today, Columbia Road is as filled with visitors as it is with residents on a Sunday morning, with popular shops, pubs and eateries which throng the surrounding streets, and even though Angela Burdett-Coutts is no longer with us, it would be nice to believe that she’s wandering around this incredibly beautiful part of her legacy.

However, even though Angela Burdett-Coutts acquired these newfound riches, she was swamped with letters from keen admirers, so much so that she and her governess Hannah Meredith came up with a signal to terminate meetings when a bachelor proposed to her.

She was even stalked for two years by Richard Dunn, a bankrupt Irish barrister desperate to get his hands on her wealth, but there was one man who caught her eye, the Duke of Wellington, to whom she proposed at the age of 33 when he was seventy-eight, however, he refused, certain that he was too old for her, but her life’s work began when she met Charles Dickens, shortly after she inherited her wealth, and while their relationship was never romantic, the pair shared an intimate friendship, and Angela was the author’s inspiration for the character Agnes Wickfield in David Copperfield.

Angela Burdett-Coutts was called ‘the Queen of the Poor’ by her fans and she was to become the first woman to be made a Baroness in her own right before becoming the first female Freeman a year later.