Who buys flowers in the middle of the night? Boris Johnson, panicked brides, drunk people and London’s wealthiest inhabitants

‘It’s a very strange idea,’ I tell David Cohen. The idea is Flower Station, on the edge of Regent’s Park, the capital’s only 24-hour physical flower shop. ‘I take that as a compliment,’ he replies. The shop never closes for one simple reason. They cannot fit all of their stock inside their small road-side premises, so have spilled out onto Baker Street, brightening up the sights of passers by with an explosion of sweetly-scented blooms.

David saw endless potential where no one else did when the petrol station below his flat closed down. ‘It was 24 hours, which was amazing because if I ever wanted milk or whatever, late at night, it was just there,’ he says. ‘It had been closed for a few years, and I had been living there and walking past it each day, watching it become an eyesore — people would dump rubbish there, and it was awful. I struggled with how it was and, having a little bit of a business head, started thinking about what could be done with it.’

His favourite flower is the peony. ‘The thing I like about it is how tight and unimpressive it is in the beginning, until it opens up and you start seeing all of its potential and it becomes amazing.’ It’s a fitting choice.

His original concept was for a drive-through florist, which would have appealed to the busy nature of the roads in the central London hotspot. He wanted to serve customers like himself: those who were working late who wanted to buy a bouquet for a loved one on their way home. ‘It was the convenience, it was the late night element that I wanted,’ David says. ‘But the idea of opening for 24 hours a day came when we were getting more and more flowers, we were squeezing them into the shop, which is small, and we had to take in all the flowers that we displayed outside on the forecourt every night.’ It made much more sense, David explains, to save time by axing the daily closing up and re-opening issue altogether — which can also damage the flowers — by simply always being open. That way someone could be employed overnight to condition the flowers (trimming their stems, changing their water, etc.) with the added bonus of making a sale if any nocturnal customers happened to stop by. Which they did, and continue to do, today.

So, who are these mysterious nighttime customers in search of a bouquet? ‘I don’t want to say drunk people,’ says David, with a tone that implies that it is, in fact, drunk people. ‘Guilty boyfriends that are trying to make amends to their girlfriends?’ I suggest. ‘It happens,’ he admits, before adding: ‘You know, people meet at night, and they’re on their way home together and it’s: “Hang on a second, I’ll buy you a rose.” Some people go crazy, spending several hundreds of pounds.’

‘Very nice hotels on Park Lane’ will also ring up at 2am requesting specific blooms. The young super rich will turn up in ‘a very nice car’ with a girl in the passenger seat who is ‘all dolled up’ to select a specific bouquet. Panicked brides whose florists have let them down last minute will ring up at all hours. The first year the shop opened, Boris Johnson stopped by on a bicycle late one evening and purchased a single rose. Valentines day, David relates ‘is crazy’. ‘The biggest queues are not the night before, but the night after — when technically it’s not Valentine’s Day anymore,’ he says, referring to the buying habits of last-minute lovers.

Friday and Saturday nights can also be hectic. In fact, Iris, one of the staffers at Flower Station, is surprised and relieved when I tell her I am keen to work the night shift with her on a recent Friday night. ‘We are really busy. It depends on the night of the week — in the week it’s fine — but on Friday and the weekend it can be hard, we get a lot of drunk people. The worst time is when they come out of the club,’ she tells me, with a posy of vibrant carnations in one hand and a pair of pruning shears in the other, when I arrive at 8pm to begin the gruelling 12-hour night shift.

Iris has been working at Flower Station for five months, taking on the night shift as she trains to be a florist, having switched careers from hospitality. She encourages me to wrap up warm and stock up on caffeine for the hours ahead. ‘You have to keep working, so that you don’t fall asleep,’ she says with a smile. Manjeet is also on shift. Sometimes they have just one staffer working, but never a woman on her own. ‘I think it would be dangerous,’ Iris says.

‘I didn’t really know anything about flowers when I started, but after one month I knew nearly all of the names,’ she says as she takes me out back to begin a long stint of conditioning the flowers that have arrived that day. The chime of the Deliveroo sound that alerts workers to a new order is fairly regular. ‘It is very popular in winter,’ she says, and I can see why. The biting cold means we are wrapped up warm for our outdoor shift.

As 9pm rolls round, the night customers begin to filter in. At 9:15pm three brothers arrive after a boozy dinner and have a spirited debate about which flowers to get for their mother’s birthday, which is tomorrow. They insist they had not forgotten, and knew that Flower Station would be open. They decide on eight light pink roses surrounded by a spray of baby’s breath. They were here at 3am last time, they say. ‘It’s great because it’s so central and we always pass it on the way back from dinner,’ one adds. Manjeet, who has only been at Flower Station for a few months, grasps the stems firmly. There’s such an art to the assembly as he weaves the blooms in his hands into a tightly coiled fuchsia display. It is hard to look away, especially considering he is not one of the store's fully trained florists — they work on the day shifts.

The brothers also buy one singular white rose, asking for the stem to be cut short. Manjeet does so, wraps their bouquet in tissue paper and cellophane and completes the ritual by tying it up with a black a bow and placing it in an expensive-looking gift bag. The total cost of the bouquet is £55 and the brother’s pay in cash, not batting an eyelid at the price. The next customers, at 9:45pm, are a father and son who each select a bouquet for the boy’s mother.

‘Is it a mix of male and female customers at night?’ I ask Manjeet. ‘Only men,’ he replies. At 10:15pm a man in an all-grey tracksuit shows up, selecting six pink roses in two shades. He is on the phone the entire time speaking to someone in a language I can’t understand and drives away in a black BMW.

Another man comes in, again for roses, this time red, at 11pm. He selects a dozen. I start to feel sad for some of the other flowers. Roses are more expensive (£4 a stem, £5 if they’re red) when compared to many of the other, cheaper flowers. They are by far the most popular, as they are perceived as more luxurious, and more romantic, Iris and Manjeet think.

‘I never buy flowers for my wife. This is the first time,’ the man says, before paying for the £60 bouquet and leaving in a ridiculously expensive-looking car. ‘Do you think they are for his wife?’ I ask Iris. ‘Probably not,’ she replies, before ordering us all a midnight snack from Honest Burger.

At 1:20am an incredibly angry man comes in demanding a delivery for Tuesday. When Iris advises him to place an order via their website, he is apoplectic, and says he ‘doesn’t know how to use the internet.’ He goes on to speak only to Manjeet, referring to him as ‘boss’. He demands the most expensive and largest roses, mostly red and pink. ‘And give me a vase with it as well,’ he says.

The next customers are more pleasant: a tipsy couple, young and clearly in love, they giggle as they choose a white and pink bouquet at 2:09am. As the night ticks on customers come and go, all happy to spend big on extravagant bouquets, most of them paying in cash. Deliveroo chimes constantly and between conditioning flowers, serving customers and preparing orders for delivery, Manjeet, Iris and I are kept busy.

At 3:30am I am exhausted, with the novelty of working in a flower shop overnight well and truly worn off. I am desperate for my bed. ‘That’s probably it for tonight,’ Iris says, and I gratefully agree when she suggests I go home early. It is exhausting work, and Manjeet and she will carry on until they are relieved of their shift at 8am by the day team.

Earlier in the night I had asked Iris why she traded in a better-paid job in hospitality, with much better hours, to work as a night florist. She works four to five nights a week and some day shifts. Her boyfriend, who she lives with, works a 9-5, so it can’t be easy to navigate their vastly different working hours.

‘To do a night shift in a place like this you need to really have a passion for flowers, otherwise you spend all night thinking: “What am I doing it for?”’ she says. ‘It’s very physical being a florist but, while you get tired you’re not drained — it’s great to be bringing people joy.’

She can’t pick a favourite flower, but cites chrysanthemums as a stand out. Cradling one, she inspects its honeycomb-like web of petals delicately before showing it to me. ‘How can Nature do that?’ she asks. ‘It’s just amazing.’