John Walsh: Tales of the City

Now that every well-fed London bourgeois spends his Saturday mornings steering his children around Borough Market in search of organic coffee, hand-reared widgeon, line-caught dace, special-issue Stilton'n'cranberry sausages and home-smoked eel, I suppose it's idle to point out that I was on to the farmer's market phenomenon right from the get-go. Oh yes. Heedless of sub-zero temperatures and the tears frozen on my children's cheeks, I regularly drove up to London Bridge, compared notes on black and white pudding with stallholders in a loud, hectoring voice, tasted the then-trendy innovation of multi-juice cocktails, signed petitions urging the importance of Slow Food, bought the children helpings of pan-fried chitterlings, or intestines, for lunch (really disgusting, in hindsight) and thought nothing of spending £3.75 on two pounds of Egyptian potatoes on the understanding that they were really really hyper-organic and were lovingly nurtured, free of noxious sprays, in the lush, exotic soil of far-off Luxor.

The food was always the point of the place, but I grew to love the area. It was a cornucopia of gorgeous sights, smells and textures: the colossal roundels of cheese in Neal's Yard, the bowls of roasted broad beans at the Brindisa bar, the double-barrelled barmaid in the Market Porter, the array of chorizo sausages here, the gaping monkfish there, the florid wine merchant and his desperate late-afternoon discounts, the sunken majesty of Southwark Cathedral. I helped to launch a short-lived magazine called The Cut, devoted to the area and its history; we met on the first floor of an off-licence, watching trains rumbling along the overhead railway and thinking: "Gosh, this is sooooo ancient."

Which of course it is. As you know, gentle reader, London Bridge was the only bridge over the Thames from Roman times until 1750, and the Borough (London's first true "suburb") was where farmers from the southern metropolis, Kent and Surrey could come to flog their produce to City grocers. Which is why there's been a market here since medieval times. It is, all agree, formidably Victorian to look at, with its railway arches and its glass-and-iron cupola (shamefully, nicked from the old Covent Garden). Only a madman would want it to change, or to spoil such a spectacle, such a jewel of retail antiquity.

This is not a view shared by Network Rail, the railway operator, which is determined to run a great concrete and steel railway viaduct through the heart of the conservation area and the market. It (or its predecessors) has been trying since 1987, and its plans involve demolishing upwards of 20 listed buildings and much of the vaulted glass roof. It's crazy, but it's close to becoming a reality; Network Rail was granted planning permission in October. Now it is trying to raise a rumoured £3bn, and is being helped along with stonking great subventions from the Department for Transport to help with legal battles.

If this scheme goes ahead, the character of the market will be stifled just as surely as the Wensleydale sheep's cheese and Dead Sea rock-salt crystals will be smothered in brick dust for two years. And the rail bottleneck this scheme is meant to improve will be as bad as ever.

Honestly. First, the Corporation of London shaves off a quarter of Spitalfields market to make room for offices; then it announces it'll knock down the general market at Smithfield to put in some chain-stores. Now this. What on earth have they got against markets?

Whether you're a dedicated foodie or a conservationist, you might like to contact www.sabmac.co.uk, home of the save-the-market-area campaign, and coo a supportive word in their ear. And when Network Rail sends in its first tentative surveyors, let us band together, O foodie comrades, and see them off with a barrage of sourdough loaves and handmade chocolate truffles.

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It's famously hard to get into Italian churches and cathedrals if you're improperly dressed: any hats, sleeveless frocks, halter-necks, short skirts, bare midriffs or descending baggy jeans, and you're soon upbraided by security men who'll throw you out or cover you up with a blanket.

You expect that in churches. But there are now dress codes in Manchester nightclubs that are just as severe. "No hats, hoodies or sportswear," says a sign at the Opus club. Wearing too much black will get you thrown out (what are you trying to do, melt into the darkness?), as will striped shirts.

Hello? Striped shirts, those harmless insignia of Mr Ordinary Out On the Razzle? Apparently, they're the garment du choix of troublemakers, even if they're made by Duchamp and cost £80 in the sale. It's a drugs-code thing - dealers can now be identified by their designer colours ("Look out for the guy in the Dolce e Gabbana mauve and white stripes..."). Certain clubs in Manchester even specify, at the entrance, which shirt labels are and aren't allowed in. Things have come to a pretty pass when a bouncer can look you up and down and bar your passage because you're wearing the Wrong Designer Trousers...

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Robert Redford's Sundance Institute has commissioned a slew of short films to be made specially for mobile phones. They'll be launched in Barcelona next week, at the World Congress on mobile multimedia. But the five-minute epics won't be watched on a viewing-room screen - they're to be viewed only on phone handsets, and fans can download the films from a mobile-phone operator and send to each other.

Is this the future of movies? As micro-technology and our dwindling attention-spans collide, will the classic films of the future be miniature ones? Stand by for the launch of Five Dalmatians, Mildly Grubby Dancing, Snakes in a Pram, The Maltese Sparrow...

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