More footfall means better takings and a different, less satisfying kind of trade for the stallholders caught in the middle
The Sunday Market Crowd Has Changed, and I Am Trying Not to Be the Person Who Complains About It
I have lived near enough to the Sunday markets for long enough now that I have started to notice myself doing the thing I promised I would never do, the thing every long-term resident of a changing neighbourhood eventually does, which is comparing the current crowd unfavourably to some earlier, better-remembered version of itself. I am trying, genuinely, to interrogate that instinct rather than simply indulge it, because I am fairly sure at least some of what I am nostalgic for was never quite as uncomplicated as I now remember it.
What I Think I Remember
The version of the Sunday market I first fell in love with, several years ago now, felt smaller, scrappier, more genuinely local, stalls run by the same handful of families for years, a vintage rail you could actually find something in because the crowd thinning it out hadn’t yet arrived in the numbers it does now. Whether that memory is entirely accurate or partly the natural gilding that happens to anyone’s early experience of a place they came to love, I genuinely cannot say with full confidence. Memory is not a reliable market researcher.
What Is Actually Happening Now
What is verifiably true, rather than merely remembered, is that footfall has increased substantially, driven by a combination of the area’s continued rise as a destination for both domestic and international visitors, and a much larger presence of stalls explicitly aimed at that visitor market rather than at locals doing an actual weekly shop. Tourism and market footfall data tracked by local business associations and covered periodically in outlets including Londonist has documented the shift toward a more visitor-oriented stall mix over the past several years, alongside genuine concern from some longtime traders about rising pitch fees pricing out smaller, more idiosyncratic sellers in favour of operators who can better absorb the cost through volume.
The Traders Caught In the Middle
I spoke to one stallholder who has run the same vintage clothing pitch for the better part of a decade, and her account was more layered than the simple nostalgia narrative I had half expected going in. Business is genuinely better than it was, in raw takings, she told me, more people means more sales on a good Sunday than she used to see. But the nature of those sales has shifted, more quick, low-consideration tourist purchases, fewer of the regular local customers who used to come back monthly, build a relationship with her stock, and buy considered, higher-value pieces. Both things are true simultaneously, more money and a different, arguably less satisfying kind of trade, and she was admirably honest about not being entirely sure which version she preferred, even as she acknowledged which one currently pays her rent.
The Bit I Am Trying to Own Honestly
Here is the uncomfortable thing I keep circling back to: I was, myself, once part of the wave of new arrivals that an earlier generation of residents presumably regarded with exactly the same faint wariness I now catch myself directing at the tourist coach parties. The market did not become crowded and changed in some abstract, impersonal way that happened to me. It became crowded and changed partly because people like me moved here, told our friends how wonderful it was, and became, without quite noticing the moment it happened, part of the very draw we now find ourselves quietly grumbling has gotten too popular.
What I Actually Want to Say
I do not think the answer is performative gatekeeping, the increasingly tedious genre of local commentary that treats a neighbourhood’s popularity as a personal betrayal. Places change because people love them, and loving a place has always meant sharing it, however inconvenient that sharing eventually becomes for those who arrived slightly earlier. What I would ask for, if I am asking for anything at all, is simply that the market’s own economics leave enough room for the traders who built its actual character to keep affording a pitch alongside whoever the growth has since brought in, because a market that has priced out the very stalls that made it worth visiting in the first place will not stay worth visiting for very much longer, tourists or no tourists.
More Shoreditch dispatches, honestly conflicted and otherwise, live at my author page, with the wider paper at The London Prat.
I left the vintage stall that afternoon having bought, somewhat guiltily, a coat I did not strictly need, partly because I liked it and partly, I suspect, as a small act of penance for the entire preceding conversation. The stallholder wrapped it for me the way she has presumably wrapped a thousand purchases before mine, quick and practised, and told me to come back next month, the way she has presumably told a thousand customers before me as well. I intend to. Whatever else has changed about who stands in that queue beside me on a Sunday morning, the actual transaction at the heart of it, one person who makes something worth having, another person glad to have found it, remains, for now at least, exactly what it always was.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
