From the pic of the auction room , middle section, 5th, row up , 4th, and 5th. from the
right can be seen my father and his uncle , who started his fruit importing/wholesale business in
Brushfield St. (Spitalfields) circa 1922, which is now a ladies fashion shop. It was located between the L.F.E. and London’s other major fruit auction house – J & J Lyons , Gun St. and operated there until the relocation of Spitalfields Market some sixty years later.

My father’s uncle , and his eight siblings , all lived two streets behind the L.F.E. in what
was then – Butler St., This was well before the L.F.E. was built.

When I join the company aged 16, I was not allowed on the shop floor , too much bad language,
so I spent one year working for Fruit commission Agents -Butcher & Hopper
located in the London Fruit Exchange . Their office overlooked Commercial St. and “Itchy” park and from the office window I regularly saw the comings and goings of those unfortunates , depicted in so many pics of Spitalfields.

At the end of that year I joined my dad in the wholesale warehouse.

We used to see all the produce being unloaded into the storage area beneath the L.F.E. and viewed the “samples” of fruit and later he would bid and buy at auction time.
The samples were raised into the auction room by a lift, prior to each “Lot” sale.

We started work at 4am. and at 10.30 I was sent to take the prices at the auction. Within
a few minutes , in the warm I regularly fell asleep. So afterwards I nipped into
B&H to retrieve all the missing details. If my dad had known that I had fallen asleep I’m sure
he would have given me a ” clip” ’round the ear.

In those years a vast amount of produce, via the London docks, passed through the L.F.E. with destinations to all parts of the U.K. But with the advent of Ro Ro (roll on roll off – containerisation ), shippers bypassed the London docks leading to the slow decline of the L.F.E.

During this decline, at one stage, one of the two auction rooms was converted into Squash courts where I used to play after work.

Re- the pic of the rear of the Fruit Exchange – this was originally Dorset St. , where
Jack the Ripper murdered his last victim Mary Kelly.

Blue Star Line – If memory serves me right it was called the “Fed Olsen Blue Star Line”.
We were tomato and banana importers from the Canary Islands for many years and those cargo ships arrived in London and docked at Canary Wharf . Now “Not a lot of people know that”.

Shame all the nice old buildings, with so much history, are replaced by concrete and glass