The story of a day's work at Covent Garden, from the moment when the first lorry arrives in the quiet and shuttered market soon after midnight, through the increasingly busy hours around dawn, until it subsides again into inertia as the last customers, the old flower ladies who sell in the streets at evening, make their modest purchases and depart.

Lindsay Anderson has managed to insinuate all the waywardness, the beauty and surprise, where mere reporting would fall short. He creates a confident poetry out of the whistling and the backchat, the cups of tea. and the echo of boxes of bananas wheeled over stone, the intentness and pride of faces that suddenly relax into a joke or song.