In cities across the UK, traditional markets are being squeezed out by glitzy developments and chain stores. In his new book , Julian Dobson writes of these long-established local hubs as the key to a successful future for our high streets

Burly and crop-headed, Neil Stockwell patrols the perimeter of his fruit and veg stall at the entrance to Queen’s Market in Upton Park, East London, like a lovable bull terrier. For 35 years he’s exchanged banter with all-comers, from Asian elders to young West Ham supporters on their way to a match. Every passerby seems to know him.



Queen’s Market is bright, bustling and hugely popular. It’s been here for a century, and is everyone’s meeting point, drawing white East Enders from behind their well-clipped hedges in Central Park estate, Bengali and Pakistani families from the terraces that stretch in rows like Venetian blinds north to Romford Road, and bargain-hunters from every part of Africa and the Caribbean. All can find a stall selling something familiar – and maybe something new to try, whether it’s yams or plantain, dhania or jellied eels.

“This becomes a way of life, it ain’t a job,” Stockwell says. “It becomes a labour of love, the people you serve every week – it’s not just a job”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Plans to redevelop Queen’s Market, East London, were scrapped after a petition was signed by 12,000 people. Photograph: Graham Turner

For Stockwell and his fellow traders, and for many of his customers, trade and community go hand in hand. But the mayor of Newham, Sir Robin Wales, has had other ideas for a long time. For much of the last decade the traders have fought plans to halve the size of the market to make room for a new Asda supermarket and luxury flats.

The traders and locals, who feared some of the poorest people in the East End would be priced out, hailed a huge victory when Asda pulled out of the initial deal in 2006. The developers, St Modwen, and Newham Council came back with a revised scheme. Pauline Rowe, a local resident, coordinated the Friends of Queen’s Market campaign, arguing that the council’s plans would reduce the traditional stalls to a “market-in-a-mall” surrounded by the same chain stores that dominate every other shopping centre in East London.

On the developers’ side of the divide were ranged bright computer generated images and the PR big guns of Newham Council and St Modwen. The new building would “enhance Green Street’s status as a visitor destination”, with 164 new stalls, more than 6,000 square metres of new shops, a “state-of-the-art” council office and the icing on the cake, a 31-storey residential tower – on the site, ironically, of the now demolished James Sinclair Point, one of the more hulking and disreputable examples of post-war municipal slab architecture.

On the opposing front stood Friends of Queen’s Market, with more than 12,000 signatures on a petition against the plans.

“I’ve never ever had a political bone in my body, but I knew it was wrong,” says Stockwell. “I knew in my heart I could not let this man do what he wanted to do to this place. It went against everything I’ve ever believed in, working hard, treating people with respect”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Traders are fighting to save the soul of Queen’s Market. Photograph: Graham Turner

But the planners were hard to budge. In May 2009, however, London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, and the Greater London Authority (GLA) rejected the St Modwen plans on the grounds that the proposed tower block was unattractive and disproportionately large. The following year St Modwen cut its losses and parted company with Newham Council. But hostilities are suspended, not over.

Newham Council’s ‘core strategy’ still considers Queen’s Market suitable for redevelopment, with an implicit invitation to a new partner whenever the returns look attractive enough. “The decision to terminate the Queen’s Market contract with the developers was made because the delivery of the programme had moved substantially forwards,” was the cryptic line on Newham Council’s website, until the page was removed last year.

Neil Stockwell and the Friends of Queen’s Market continue to be vocal campaigners for a market that works for local people, not just the council and its developer allies. They argue that it’s thriving, and will stay that way if the council looks after it. For the traders and friends of Queen’s Market, the fight is not for a site but for its soul.

‘Once you’re on the stall, you’re on stage’

It’s a bitterly cold February Friday, but Tony Sinacola doesn’t seem to notice. Behind the counter at Chadwick’s Original Bury Black Puddings, he’s doing brisk business, with a steady stream of takers for the delicacy his family have made since 1865. A couple in their late fifties, their London accents sharp enough to cut through a Lancastrian fog, are on the receiving end of a good-humoured tongue-lashing on account of their southern ignorance.

Bury Market – Bury’s World Famous Market, as the advertising has it – is one of the most successful traditional markets in England. Every year up to 1,500 coach-loads of visitors descend on this former mill town to sample the wares at nearly 400 stalls. Market traders boast that you can get everything you need, from cradle to grave. There’s even a man who’ll do your headstone.

Check out the market stalls and you’ll find a lot more than black puddings. Burka-clad women are eyeing yards of iridescent fabrics at one end; at the other an elderly white woman stops to tell anyone who cares to listen that she’s been coming to the market for years, and the cheese has never been so expensive. Mrs Ogden’s tearoom, with its tiny tables and neatly chalked menus, is packed, and there’s a patient queue at Filbey’s barber shop. At the second-hand bookstall a weather-beaten stallholder sits serenely among the thrillers, glasses perched on his nose, apparently oblivious to passing browsers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bury Market in Lancashire has been going since 1444, with up to 9 million visitors annually. Photograph: Julian Dobson

Tony Sinacola says there’s one reason why the market works. “People come and they get and experience. It’s not just coming for a black pudding. We take the mickey out of them, have a laugh … You can have a laugh which you can’t do in a supermarket, so people come back. I think that’s what makes any market – the people”. His family have worked the market since 1949, and won’t go anywhere else. They sell around three-and-a-half tonnes of black pudding each week.

Over at the Barbecue Barn, Steve Moloney is a relative newcomer, having run his own stall for just eight years, but he echoes Tony’s sentiments. “The main difference between us and the supermarkets is we still give a personal service. You’ve still got contact with the person that’s serving you,” he says. “As soon as I walk on the stall I’m on stage. It doesn’t matter what’s happened at home the night before. Once you’re on the stall you’re on stage and you start performing”.

The service that once supplied the basics of life … is now becoming a curiosity and a tourist attraction

In Bury Market, trade is theatre. Andrew Heyes, the market’s manager, knows that this, coupled with good value and friendly service, is at the root of its success. Bury Market has been going since 1444, and looks as if it has a few more centuries in it: Mr Heyes says it earns £1 million a year for the local council. Up to 9 million people visit it every year. As a council service it also provides a platform for community organisations that can offer information about their activities or direct punters to some of the town’s less well-known attractions.



Andrew Heyes is proud of the market’s success and the achievements of his team. But at the other end of town, the new Rock shopping centre is stretching Bury’s retail core, offering a glass-and-concrete panorama of Marks & Spencer and Costa Coffee. In between, the 1990s Mill Gate shopping centre – itself a replacement for a 1960s precinct – has been struggling. Bury’s planners, it would seem, have also swallowed the myth of retail-led regeneration.

“The market isn’t as well supported by local people as it could be,” Heyes admits. “There’s a lot of competition – supermarkets across the road, two shopping centres. You go into one of these retail centres and it’s free parking, you come into town and it’s a fiver for the day before you even start shopping. Without the coach business [bringing tourists to Bury] at the moment we’d be really struggling.”



There remains a nagging suspicion, too, that successful markets like Bury owe their survival to a kind of cannibalising. The coach-loads of pensioners from Liverpool and North Wales are as much an indication of what is being lost in their hometowns as a sign of Bury’s unique offer. Visitors are coming partly because their own markets are declining or have disappeared, and as Bury succeeds it may accelerate that process. The service that once supplied the basics of life to people on low incomes in every sizeable town is now becoming a curiosity and a tourist attraction.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman buys fruit at Ridley Road Market. Figures show that market and convenience store purchases have fallen by 13%. Photograph: Alamy

Markets on the margins

If the traditional market is a barometer of a town’s health, it would seem many are in dire need of medical attention. Markets are being pushed to the margins, physically, economically and socially. Often this physical sidelining is exacerbated by town centre redevelopment schemes marketed as ‘regeneration’.

Economically, the old-style market has been elbowed out as supermarkets swallow ever-greater slices of consumers’ spending. The Payments Council, which monitors how and where the British public spend their money, has calculated that 58p in every retail pound went to supermarkets in 2011, up from 46p a decade before. Cash transactions – the typical market or convenience store purchase – fell from 43% to 30% of retail spending. While there are still more than 2,000 retail markets across the UK, employing around 100,000 people, Tesco alone has more than 3,500 stores and 310,000 employees in the UK. While spending at markets was estimated – very roughly – at between £1.3 billion and £3bn in 2008, Tesco’s UK revenue in 2014-15 was more than £43bn after VAT, and it knew exactly how much was coming through the tills.

Economic marginalisation brings social marginalisation. With the exception of the new generation of specialist markets, the traditional market now tends to be perceived in Britain as a place for cheap goods, frequented by pensioners and poorer people. Where once the market was the great social leveller, it is now often bypassed by the better-off.

If the traditional market​ is a barometer of a town's health, it would seem many are in dire need of medical attention

This marginalisation matters because a successful market provides far more than a place to pick up a bargain. In 2009 a House of Commons inquiry concluded that the social benefits of markets were as important as their economic functions. They can bring communities together, help promote healthy eating, provide more environmentally sustainable models of retailing than the large supermarkets, offer opportunities for new businesses, and bring life into town centres. Council-run markets generate revenue for local authorities, which can be reinvested in improvements or used to keep public services running. Smaller markets, MPs heard, “provide intimate public spaces where traders and shoppers know each other and work well for the community”.

Bargains are important too: the New Economics Foundation (NEF) found in 2006 that items bought at Queen’s Market were 53% cheaper than at a local Asda store. A survey by the National Market Traders’ Federation in 2008 found that fresh produce was, on average, 32% cheaper in markets than in supermarkets.

The story of Brixton Village in South London is a salutary tale. In 2009 Granville Arcade, six avenues of 1930s stalls and shops in Brixton’s indoor market, was on its uppers and slated for demolition by its new owners, London & Associated Properties. Trade was poor. But the market was passionately loved, if not passionately frequented, by local residents. As in Newham, a vociferous local campaign led to the abandonment of the demolition plans.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Spacemakers, Friends of Brixton Market, traders and residents ran a successful campaign against proposals to demolish Brixton Village. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose

This is where Spacemakers came in. Loosely organised by writer and activist Dougald Hine, Spacemakers was a collective of “activists, architects, artists, thinktankers, squatters and others” – a motley crew of well-meaning people who suddenly, via contacts in Lambeth Council, had an opportunity to make a difference. The market’s owners had approached the council to ask whether it could facilitate the creative temporary use of 20 empty shops, and the council handed the baton to Spacemakers.

The group negotiated three months’ funding from London & Associated Properties, held a public meeting on a bitterly cold November night, and threw out an open invitation for ideas. Within a week 98 proposals had been submitted, from a recycled clothes shop to a ‘community shop’ run by Transition Town Brixton, the Market Traders’ Federation and Friends of Brixton Market.

For Hine, the creation of what became known as Brixton Village was an object lesson in collaboration. He suggested there was a difference between the ‘market’ as envisaged by governments and corporations, and the ‘marketplace’. He writes:

A marketplace … is a sociable space in which buying and selling take place surrounded by other activities, a place you come to see friends, to hear stories, to argue about ideas. Crucially, unlike a Starbucks or a department store, it is a space where your welcome is not determined purely by your ability to spend money.

Eight months on, the market was thriving. Seven of the projects put forward on that November evening had become long-term tenants, including the community shop and a local food deli. Visitor numbers were rising. Disagreements between the landlord and traders no longer made the front page of the local paper. In August 2010 a glowing report in the New York Times swooned over the “playful pop-up shops” and the delicious modern dishes in Ian Riley’s bistro, including “courgette fritters with watercress, peas and ewe cheese”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brixton Village, formerly Granville Arcade. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose

Shortly afterwards, the headline on the front page of the South London Press told a different story: “Rent hikes are kick in the teeth,” it yelled; traders faced rises of up to 50%. Delighted with the Spacemakers-inspired revamp, it seemed, London & Associated Properties had decided to cash in. Traders complained they had received bills backdated to 2007, the date of the change of landlord. Some were as high as £30,000. London & Associated Properties told the South London Press at the time that “if an area has become more popular rents can go up”.

The local newspaper story was a taste of things to come. In 2012, with the market now operated by InShops, a subsidiary of a French company, on behalf of London & Associated, there was another round of rent rises. The Artists Studio Company, which provided 23 low-rent studios above shops in the market, was told its lease would not be renewed. Early in 2013 the London Evening Standard asked: ‘Is gentrification killing Brixton Market?’.

The market’s website recently advertised Second Avenue in Brixton Village as “a little slice of Hoxton”, and it was done without any sense of irony. Brixton and Hoxton were both once poor areas, rough and ready places where people made do on very little. Brixton was a centre of London’s Caribbean population in the 1970s; Hoxton was traditional white working class. Now Brixton’s gentrification is promoted as an echo of Hoxton’s, and the make-do spirit of both the traditional market traders and initiatives like Spacemakers risks being priced out.

Taking a longer view

The pop-up, ephemeral and spontaneous can bring a market to life, creating splashes of colour among everyday greys. But it takes more than that to keep a market alive. Volunteers can burn out, and will lose heart if they feel they are being exploited as a free resource by others whose interest in a locality is framed by their chances of profiting from it.

The conundrum is to bring the best of the traditional, the pop-up and the locally sourced together in a way that combines the spirit of Spacemakers with the guts of places like Bury.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kirkgate Market was once a ‘symbol of civic pride’ for the city of Leeds. Photograph: David Levene

Many markets, like Bury, are still run by local councils and bring money into their coffers. On the face of it such a model should work well, bringing together commerce and community, democratic accountability and local enterprise. Markets were once a symbol of civic pride: Leeds City Council constructed a grand entrance for its Kirkgate Market in 1904, a project that ran a then-astronomical £37,000 over budget. These days the council’s civic boosterism is more focused on providing an arena for big-ticket entertainment events, and the market is under threat from sparkling new retail developments, including the planned Victoria Gate shopping centre.

But for every council that celebrates and invests in its market, there are more that neglect them or view them as an unwelcome distraction from the real business of local government such as collecting the bins or providing social services. Oxford’s famous covered market is just one of many that have been threatened with rent increases that traders fear will put them out of business, clearing the way for redevelopment; traders garnered 11,000 signatures on a petition against proposed rent rises. The connection between investing in a market to bring in new customers and the health of the local economy often goes unnoticed at a strategic level. In such circumstances it is no surprise that some communities believe their markets will do better and become more innovative outside council control.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An Incredible Edible community garden. Photograph: Gary Calton

In Todmorden, at the head of the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire, the town’s market hall has seen better days. The town has gained an international reputation as the birthplace of a local food movement, galvanised by Incredible Edible Todmorden, which has transformed neglected public spaces into community growing areas with its simple slogan of ‘If you eat, you’re in’. But the market hall, despite healthy local support and a good selection of traders, is in poor physical shape, and the local council has little money for maintenance and investment. There is talk of transferring the hall to a new community-run company.



Similar approaches are being considered in other towns. If the council doesn’t have the energy or resources to reinvigorate the market, the argument goes, let local people do so. The Localism Act 2011 in England allows “assets of community value” to be identified and sold to resident-led organisations. Local authorities can divest themselves of assets that they cannot manage well; community organisations can get on with putting their ideas into practice without the bureaucracy that often accompanies local government.

The realities can be more complex than that. ‘Community assets’ can quickly turn into liabilities, especially when they are ornate but poorly maintained Victorian buildings. Local enthusiasm does not necessarily imply local capacity.

Nevertheless, there is a common and hopeful thread that runs through the best local markets, whether they are community-led, run by local authorities, organised by producers’ cooperatives or stimulated by temporary events and activities. It is the belief that local benefit and commercial activity can go hand in hand, and that there is room for new and more equitable and engaging forms of exchange.

If we are to rehumanise the concept of exchange and create town centres with the richness and variety of the ancient agora, learning from and applying new ideas to our historic markets could be a good way to start. But there are many obstacles to be overcome if we are to reinvent the agora for the 21st century.



This is an edited extract from How to Save Our Town Centres, published by Policy Press. Julian Dobson is a writer and speaker and director of the research consultancy Urban Pollinators.