According to a recent article in this paper, new research points to an increase in UK house prices around those areas within easy footfall of a farmers’ market. The markets are becoming a new marker in identifying areas that have lately been gentrified.

It figures that the person who has shelled out ￡2m on a nearly three-bedroom house with a postage stamp-sized back garden might spend a commensurately exorbitant amount on a punnet of “heritage” tomatoes (organic, of course). Few, however, would want to be identified as such.

In the microcosm of market society, a friendly antipathy now exists between those who first arrived in the area — “back when this very street was known as ‘crack alley’” — and have since worked so self-consciously to regenerate their living environs, and those hedge-funders and minor oligarchs who now parade in them. The early suburban pioneers look with disdain at the Morgan Stanley arrivistes. And the arrivistes are trying to assimilate; the shame of being mocked by a primary-school-teacher-turned-Pilates-instructor for having paid three times as much as they for a house that will never have off-road parking is particularly acute.