Trafalgar Place is a splash of colour against the grey formality of Adderley Street. Buckets of proteas, roses and gladioli crowd the pavement and the air is thick with the scent of fresh blooms. For 45 years, sisters Alison and Karen Snyders have sold flowers here, at prices that started at R1 a bunch. “It’s a family thing; it’s going from generation to generation,” Alison tells the FM.
The market has stood for about 150 years, surviving the Group Areas Act, Covid and an increasingly expensive city centre. Now it faces a new challenge: a municipal trading plan that would formalise how it operates.
Trading here has always run on trust. Sellers self-regulate, taking turns for the prized spot facing Adderley Street. The city’s new plan would limit trading hours to 6am–6pm and introduce a R148 monthly fee. More than 6,500 people have signed a petition calling for the plan to be withdrawn.
“This is the beauty of Cape Town,” Alison says. She expects her children to take over the stall one day, as has happened for decades. But rigid hours sit uneasily with a trade built on urgency. “Our customers come here late at night, at the last minute. There are a lot of people who have funerals, and they’ve forgotten about the flowers.” Christmas, Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day are the busiest days of all. “That is the heart of the flower market. We want to see people happy.”
Rising parking costs have already driven customers away, she says — and the market itself has been neglected. “It’s got slippery tiles ... when it rains, all your flowers are wet. It’s too hot in summer.” She welcomes upgrades, but on the traders’ terms: “We don’t want little shops; we want a market that celebrates what we’re doing here.”
Delia Gamieldien, 58, is a second-generation seller who grew up in the market and took over her mother’s business. “They want to upgrade our market, but the rules come with it. We don’t need them.” She recalls community donations sustaining her family through the 2020 lockdown and nights spent dozing in a chair before Valentine’s Day or Eid. Losing the Adderley Street frontage, she says, would hit hardest: “There are more sales in the front than at the back. That’s why we take turns.”
A provincial heritage nomination that was heard before Heritage Western Cape in May argues that the market deserves protection as a site of outstanding historical importance — tracing flower selling in the city centre back to 1860 and linking it to the marginalisation of black and coloured communities excluded from formal horticulture and to forced removals from Constantia in the 1960s. It calls the market “a rare and living cultural landscape” of resistance and adaptation.
Nominations for the provincial heritage site are open until the end of the month, while the city says it has undertaken a public participation process on its proposed trading plan.
“All registered traders and markets in Cape Town operate under the security of trading plans to ensure fairness and good trading conditions,” says James Vos, mayoral committee member for economic growth. He says longer trading hours and more stalls are among the changes now being considered, alongside preferential permits for long-standing sellers.
Planned upgrades include 20 lockable stalls, better lighting and safety and a formal loading area via Parliament Street — intended, Vos says, “to honour the Trafalgar Place flower market as a proud part of Cape Town’s living heritage”.
For the sellers, however, the question remains whose vision the upgrade will serve. “Not what they want,” says Alison Snyders. “What we want.”