I hope I am around long enough at least to enjoy reading the next chapter in the story of the UK’s most famous flower, fruit and vegetable market at Nine Elms.

I understand the redevelopment, which is designed both to support the tenants and to bring in ancillary businesses, will take several years. And I just hope that it will honour the market’s long history and that fruit, vegetables and horticulture will remain its key elements.

That said, perhaps we are ready, at last, to move towards London’s first central fresh food centre. I choose my words carefully, as the six-mile exclusion zone that protects Smithfield and Billingsgate is still very much in operation. On this basis alone, I suspect it will take many more years for The Garden, as it has recently been rechristened, to grow to any size approaching the stature of Rungis.

Having worked off the Strand in old Covent Garden and then traipsed the buyers’ walk and offices gleaning information as a journalist, I have been familiar with the rumour that began probably 200 years earlier that the market was going to move, be redeveloped and widen its scope.

When the day finally came it was the Vauxhall site that won the day, although earlier several other blueprints came off the drawing board. There was also endless debate on the logic of London actually having six wholesale produce markets.

Some 35 years ago, New Covent Garden Market (NCGM) opened its doors. Some time later, New Spitalfields relocated to Leyton, and Brentford had moved to become Western International. The one unchanging anomaly was the trustee-owned Borough in the shadow of Southwark Cathedral, which has transformed itself to become a major public shopping experience.

But there were further radical changes associated with the moves. Many family names regenerated elsewhere, as importers and pre-packers on greenfield sites located themselves near motorways to serve the expanding supermarket trade - or simply disappeared.

London’s street markets survived better than most, but as high street retailers shrank, fruiterers and greengrocers were not immune. The saving grace for most markets, including NCGM, has become the foodservice element.

Now, NCGM’s market authority has, to its credit, taken the potential of offering other foodstuffs as far as possible and will rejuvenate the site’s facilities.

A wider role may still be far off - and even unobtainable - but the one certain thing within the whole industry is that distribution and customer requirements will continue to change, as they have before.

The recent announcement ensures that the future of a very large proportion of the fresh produce wholesale industry serving the greater London area is sustained. However, we must remember the old adage that, to be successful, markets are made rather than simply built.