Visit the Milnerton Market

The wind blows a lot out here, and it's closer to the truth to call the Milnerton mar­ket some­thing of a boot sale, but if you're in the mood for hunt­ing up a bar­gain or rum­ma­ging through genu­ine antiques, and get­ting them for a song, then you can over­look the old car parts and inev­it­able Chinese 'very cheap' toy stalls for the sheer joy of mak­ing a find!

We got chat­ting, soon after arriv­ing at the mar­ket, to the seller of socks. Almost at the start of the mar­ket stands a stall that has a sock col­lec­tion of note. I'm not usu­ally in the mar­ket for socks, but mohair socks for winter were sud­denly an imper­at­ive, par­tic­u­larly as, with much dig­ging, mut­ter­ing and re-arranging, a tiny pair ('kept spe­cially for my cli­ents with small feet') was hauled out for my son, for whom find­ing a pair of warm, thick winter socks is rather like look­ing for a needle in a hay­stack (if the aver­age chain store is any­thing to go by then children's feet don't feel the cold) ...

The Milnerton Market lies on an open piece of land smack bang next to the R27 in Milnerton every Saturday and Sunday from 07h00 until around 16h00. It lies on a sliver of Paarden Island closest to the sea that is, to say the least, rather exposed. This is a sec­tion of reclaimed land close to the beaches where the intial white set­tlers to this coun­try landed, which serves as some­thing of a meta­phor if you con­sider that for many of the stall hold­ers, the mar­ket is an attempt to regain a place in the city's economy.

The mar­ket is divided into two or so rows of stalls that stretch for miles (or so it seems) up the R27 and include some good food stalls to make sure you won't go hungry — if pan­cakes and boere­wors rolls are your kind of thing, then they're great to stave off the hun­ger pangs.

If you're a mar­ket snob, more inclined towards the local food mar­kets that have taken Cape Town by storm, then you're bet­ter off head­ing to the Neighbourgoods mar­ket in Woodstock or the Earth Fair mar­ket in Tokai. But if you want a good old fash­ioned 'any­thing goes' mar­ket, then Milnerton is a great place to while away a morn­ing. I real­ised, after milling around for a time, that it was the market's lack of pre­ten­tion that made me slightly uneasy, so used am I to a more struc­tured and aes­thetic mar­ket environment.

I was to learn that, if you're pre­pared to stop at a stall and look inter­ested, just about every stall owner has some­thing of note to impart. At the sock stall we learned that a par­tic­u­lar blend of mohair would cost us double any­where else. When this incred­ible piece of inform­a­tion didn't seem to affect me, the sock seller hauled out a much fingered ver­sion of a news­pa­per art­icle about mohair socks and pro­ceeded to read pas­sages vir­tu­ally by rote. This was quite a per­form­ance if you con­sider that I was going to buy the socks anyway!

If you're into retro fash­ion, then one or two of the antique stands usu­ally include a couple of suit­cases of cloth­ing through which stu­dents are gen­er­ally rum­ma­ging in search of that 'just divine' poly­es­ter print dress for next week's party, and there are cer­tainly some gems in amongst the myriad stalls that line the side of the road — I can ima­gine that if you are a designer or artist then Milnerton could be a finder's treas­ure trove! Bone china sits along­side old pots, fat Buddhas and tin cans, lan­terns, can­dle­sticks and the odd collector's chair are all there for the tak­ing — you just need a fair amount of per­sist­ence, and an eye to spot a bargain.

Glass bottles, plants and end­less book stalls lie along­side Chinese bowls and spoons and old cam­era equip­ment. The secret to mak­ing a suc­cess of your trawl through the Milnerton mar­ket is not to become immune. There are so many stalls that after about twenty minutes one begins to lose the impulse to dig through items. I became totally over­whelmed at the amount of 'stuff' to be had, and the num­ber of car parts on sale had me reel­ing! Perhaps it's a great way to pick up a cheap coil or whatever, but the thought of select­ing a spare rear­view mir­ror or pick­ing out a win­dow winder did not appeal.

We were drawn to a stall selling han­nepoort grapes, vir­tu­ally from the back of a bakkie — most of the stalls oper­ate this way — where we soon learnt, watch­ing money and grapes chan­ging hands, that a level of hag­gling was expec­ted of us. Trying to get someone to lower his price doesn't come nat­ur­ally to me, but it does pay off. Both parties feel as though they've got some­thing out of the deal (would that super­mar­kets oper­ated that way!)

If you're even vaguely addicted to col­lect­ing junk, then Milnerton's mar­ket is the place for you! Oh, and did I men­tion the pleth­ora of toy trains?

Photo Credits:
Photographs used in this art­icle by Skinnymalinx on Flickr.com (Creative Commons License).

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