Harper-Thames on the Return of Street Markets to East London, Who They Serve Now, and Whether This Is the Same Thing With a Better Instagram Account
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Harper-Thames | Shore Roar Shoreditch Street Journalism
The weekend market on Brick Lane is busy on a Saturday in April in the way that things are busy in Shoreditch: fully, visually, with a mixture of people who belong there in the historical sense and people who belong there in the current economic sense and people who are visiting both of those things simultaneously while also eating something from a paper container. I walked it last Saturday with a notebook and the specific intentions of a journalist who has been covering this neighbourhood for four years and who is trying to maintain her capacity for surprise, which is increasingly difficult because the surprise is structural and the structure is stable.
The market occupies the same physical space it has occupied for generations. The Bangladeshi community that shaped the eastern part of Brick Lane for fifty years is still present, diminished by rent pressure, maintained by cultural investment and by the specific quality of community that does not dissolve when property values rise because it is built on relationship and memory rather than on affordability alone. The curry houses at the top of the lane are still there. Some are better than they were. Some are performing the memory of what they were. The market adjacent to them has changed more dramatically.
What The Market Is Now
The current Brick Lane market’s Sunday offering divides into several distinct zones: the original second-hand and vintage section, which has been gentrified from genuine junk trading to curated vintage with commensurate price increases; the street food section, which is genuinely excellent and genuinely diverse and costs more than the equivalent food did fifteen years ago, reflecting both quality improvements and the general London food price inflation; and the craft and design section, which is technically impressive, ethically sourced, and priced for the demographic that the area now serves rather than the demographic that the area historically served.
The traders in the craft section are not cynics. They are people who make things and want to sell them and who have found in the weekend market infrastructure a distribution route that requires less upfront capital than a permanent shop. The things they make are often good. The prices are often fair given the cost of making them in London. The market serves a real function for these traders and for the customers who appreciate what they make. This is not a criticism of the market. It is an observation that the market, like the neighbourhood, serves a different constituency than it once did, and that the change is not only about what money can buy but about who is present and who is not.
The Bangladeshi curry house has a QR code menu now. The vintage stall is curated by a former fashion student. The man who has sold leather goods from the same pitch for thirty years is still there, slightly to the left of where he used to be. The market contains all of this simultaneously. My market coverage continues at The London Prat, where I also write about the planning implications for market infrastructure in the council’s local plan review.
For market economies you can eat at, see NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
