Today Covent Garden in central London is an area of fashionable cafes, wine bars and high- end luxury goods shops but at one time it was the home of the wholesale fruit and vegetable trade serving the whole of London and very much a working environment.

By the late sixties growing traffic congestion, parking problems and narrow streets unsuitable for the increasing size of lorries made a move from this increasingly valuable land more or less inevitable and the whole shooting match was moved to a new site at Nine Elms, once the venue of the Southern region’s largest steam locomotive shed, on the other side of the Thames.

Today the trade is carried on in a huge modern complex, the vehicles are forty- ton juggernauts but the Cockey characters doing the wheeling and dealing are still very much the same and probably the sons and grandsons of the people seen in my picture.