For 40 years, Harry West has been selling second-hand goods from his east London market pitch. “You could buy anything here,” he reminisces of the market on Kingsland Road, “and I mean anything.” West is remembering a time in the 1970s when there were 150 stalls, two rows deep, every Saturday; when there were so many people it was impossible to move.

These days, however, West is the only stallholder left on this once-buzzing strip, after Hackney council ceased the renewal of temporary licences – an act that has all but closed the market. It seems however that they did not bank on the staying power of 72-year-old West.

Despite the loss of fellow traders, his weekly stall continues to attract a crowd. He is in the business of recycling, of putting objects back into circulation, a trade that goes back much further than the environmentally friendly connotations we now associate with it. From his pitch today, West specialises in house clearances and feeds some of London’s more fashionable markets: Portobello, Broadway, Chatsworth Road.

Early in the morning, dealers visit West to fill their own stalls or high-street shops with whatever he’s uncovered that week. The rest of the day is spent selling the household goods left behind. Each week, thanks to West, these apparently discardable items are given the chance of a new life, their value restored: old jigsaws, fold-up chairs, board games, glasses, records – a mass of singular objects laid out in boxes, overflowing and unclassified, to be picked up by a flow of regular customers.

Kingsland Waste market during much busier days in 1969. Photograph: London Borough of Hackney Archives

Two miles north of the City of London and a stone’s throw from Dalston Junction, the market began in the mid-19th century, when a Hackney landowner gave permission for local people to trade their unwanted goods rent-free in front of his properties, providing them not only with a way to make a living but also with a cheaper alternative to the shops. The market, which became known as “the Waste”, has continued to this day, supportinglong-term residents but also wave after wave of migration to the area.

For decades, visitors from outside the borough also flocked here. It was the place to go for spare parts and tools – everything needed to fix bikes, cars, clocks, watches, radios or electrical items – and became one of the borough’s most eclectic markets, full of clothes, furniture, bric-a-brac and second-hand books, as well as the beats of second-hand vinyl stalls.

As one of only two remaining permanent licence holders (the other sells rolls of carpet and floor-covering from a van, away from the main cobbled market stretch), West is understandably apprehensive about whether people will continue to visit his stall. But buying and selling has always been part of his life and he has no plans to stop.

After the war, his father made money from dismantling Anderson air-raid shelters, which he then resold to farmers to use as cowsheds. West recalls, as a boy, sitting on the roof of the shelters and applying grease, ready for a “great group of lads” to come the following day to dismantle them. From the age of five, living in nearby Stoke Newington, he spent years helping his mother on Chapel Market in Islington, where she had a stall selling blankets and sheets. With no transport, they would load up a trolley with stock and walk the two miles there: “I used to push and Mum would pull.” This was when, West says, he got the market bug.

He grew up to become a major player on the scene with stalls on markets across London: Chapel Market, Wood Street Market, Rathbone Market, Petticoat Lane and a place on Vallance Road. In recent years, however, the advent of online auctions has led to a decline in the number of house clearances. There was a time when he would carry out one or two a day, and he would have six men helping him. Now he does just one or two a week.

Every market is changing and you have to change too. The people who go under are the people that don’t change Harry West

West’s stall sells all manner of goods found in house clearances. Photograph: Georgina Jarvis

West acknowledges this is a business model that will not last – not only because of a decline in the availability of goods to sell, but also because it is not something a younger generation wants to continue. “Every market is changing and you have to change too,” he says.

Yet each Saturday morning, West still arrives at the market with trucks full of furniture and household goods – along with his grandson, who brings goods packed neatly in his car. By bringing on his grandson to manage and sell the digital and technical side of things, West has given the business not only a new lease of life, but also a way of continuing a family tradition.

“He’s got the right idea,” says West, looking over at his grandson’s table displaying rows of DVDs and computer games that have been easily transported by one person. “The people who go under are the people that don’t change.”

West has also, of course, witnessed huge changes in the social makeup of the local Hackney area, but he continues to greet a steady stream of regulars, many of whom have been coming to his stall for decades. He gives one man a ribbing about needing to buy the springy chairs for sale because he is getting older now and needs help getting up. The pair laugh before his friend remembers that he is actually the younger one ... “I wondered when the penny would drop,” retorts West.

The stall run by Jackie Morris and Tony Sacco ceased last month. Photograph: Georgina Jarvis

The man complains about the council breaking promises to fix his kitchen. “I don’t like the way things are going, Harry,” he says, and begins talking about the closure of a market next to some luxury flats on the edge of the city. Well, counters West, “If you’d bought a million-pound property there, you wouldn’t want a market trader in a van like mine shouting at four in the morning.”

The pair move on to current affairs, putting the world to rights before the man spends £3 on a mop and bucket and heads home. “You get such characters here,” West smiles.

Wealth has been flowing into this part of London for decades, but in recent years the opening of Dalston Junction overground station alongside a new residential development and public square have helped build an infrastructure in which gentrification has thrived. West notes that many of his customers are now in the precarious situation of renting properties from the council that are worth upwards of £500,000.



As property prices soar and new developments start to rise up above the high street, the busy road on which the diminished Kingsland Waste market sits has become a part of London where the polarisation of wealth is particularly clear. The parade of shops in front of which West trades provides an insight into the time and place: Turkish grocery stores, a pound shop and a taxi business have become interspersed between a high-end Italian restaurant, a brand-new deli, a pop-up bar and a trendy hair salon.

For many years, Jackie Morris operated alongside West in the Waste. Like West, she specialised in house clearances – until her licence expired at the end of March, and she was forced to cease trading. “Although they haven’t said as much, we’re probably not in the great scheme of things for bringing Hackney up,” Morris told me on one of her final Saturday appearances.



For the last five years, Morris has watched her fellow traders fall away, and believes it is the council’s treatment of the vendors that has led to the market’s demise. In 2010, she wrote to the council telling them what they were doing amounted to constructive eviction. She describes disputes over their prescription of what could and couldn’t be sold on licences, along with a catalogue of examples of poor administration.

People love to have a rummage, to find exciting things. They like to ask and barter and knock you down Jackie Morris

The council seems to want to smooth out the rough edges of this once-busy market. Photograph: Georgina Jarvis

If there are plans in place for the future of Kingsland Waste market, then Hackney council are giving nothing away. A spokesman said: “Kingsland Market is not closing, the council is currently refreshing its markets strategy that will outline its approach to how all Hackney markets will be successfully maintained and managed over the next five years.”



In referring simply to “Kingsland Market” rather than the Waste, the council seems to imply an intent to smooth out the rough edges of this once-busy market, to do away with its inherited character of affordability. Morris tells of how traders were told by the council that goods should not be laid on the floor and that they must be individually priced, a directive that shows little understanding of the market’s informal culture.



“People love to have a rummage, to find exciting things. They like to ask and barter and knock you down,” Morris said while still trading at the Waste. She has now started trading at a car-boot sale in Holloway – which she hopes is close enough for her old customers to visit.

West, meanwhile, still drives in from his home in Epping each Saturday. Week on week he has watched a shift in passing trade, as an increasingly wealthy group move into the inner-London borough. Remembering the clothes stalls that once populated the Waste, he says: “The people coming in don’t want £1.99 clothes, they have money to spend.” He scoffs at how much coffee in the area now costs, when he can still buy a cup for 80p at his local caff.



West is pleased, though, to see what has happened at nearby Broadway Market – an example of a thriving contemporary street market that has been turned around to meet the distinctive tastes of the new folk who flood there every Saturday to shop. With time and energy invested into it, Broadway Market has expanded from the street into a nearby schoolyard, and is now joined by another market, Netil, which has moved in next to it.

Through these spaces it is clear to see that street markets are more than just places to buy and sell. The Waste and Broadway Market both, in their differing ways, meet the requirements of the area’s mixed group of residents, providing the old and the new with a sense of belonging and attachment.



West says he will continue selling household goods for as long as he can – but that, if the council decides to revamp the market, he will have to adapt and sell antiques instead. A market trader through and through, he has offered to meet the council to discuss how he can keep trading even as the landscape around his stall shifts.

Hackney council’s decision to stop renewing temporary market licences certainly looked like the final blow in the long and proud history of Kingsland Waste. But, says West, “they have to get rid of me first.”