to market

[Royan market]

It turns out that my predilection for markets has not gone unnoticed by my family. When I asked Alice for a suggestion for this week’s newsletter, she said, “Markets. You like a market.” I told Phoebe the subject and she said, “Yes, you like a good market”.

The young are so cool and casual. “Like.” No, I bloody love markets. I get excited by even the smallest market in the most out of the way location. I make detours, check market days in advance, ensure travel arrangements fit with market days when we go on holiday - Hay-on-Wye, Dinard, Royan - and nothing gives me greater pleasure than knowing there’s a good indoor market which is open most days eg in Budapest, Coventry, Valencia, Helsinki, or Leeds, so I can be sure of not missing out.

I genuinely wonder how anyone could not like a market, except perhaps Columbia Road flower market which these days is like one of those old world record attempts to get as many people as possible in a telephone box or an original, properly mini Mini.

[Kay Gallwey, 1978]

It used to be so colourful and funny with the stallholders all trying to outdo each other on price, quality, and decibels, but now it’s like a cattle pen and a pickpocket’s paradise. Still, occasionally it’s worth being squeezed as if through a mangle in order to be emerge triumphantly at the other end holding six dozen tulips aloft to prevent them being flattened.

[The Kay family socks and tights stall, Stockport Market, 1977, photo by Heidi Alexander]

It all began with Stockport Market. When I was eleven or so, I used to get the bus into town on a Saturday and spend ages weighing up the felt squares and sequins on the haberdashery stall, trying to decide on that week’s combination (neon-pink/purple or purple/lime-green or lime-green/neon-pink). I soaked up the noisy, friendly, bustling atmosphere, the fact that stalls were were open to all and sundry, the amusing or odd stuff that was for sale, and the cheapness of it all. Plus the marvellous 1861 iron-and-glass indoor market and, later when legal, the Yates’s Wine Lodge where freezing cold shopper and stall-holders could get hot blobs (fortified Australian wine, hot water, lemon, sugar - guaranteed to knock your Kay’s family stall socks off) . [The photo is from a wonderful collection of photos taken in the 1970s by Heidi Alexander which recently came to light and even made the pages of the Guardian.]

[‘Roses at 5 Past Nine’ by Chlöe Cheese]

I look at the photos of the market with the enormous cooling tower (long-gone) looming in the background and laugh at the contrast with another of my favourite markets: Dieppe. Like so many towns in France, its market is presided over by a church, so Dieppe gets a huge medieval church, while Stockport gets a cooling tower. (Tbf there is a mostly C19 church behind the indoor market.)

[Café des Tribunaux, Dieppe’, c1890, Walter Sickert]

Dieppe is a fabulous place to be on a Saturday morning, especially in the colder months when it’s all about potatoes, garlic, and onions. The huge market divides at the Café des Tribunaux where Oscar Wilde held court after being released from Reading Gaol and where you can have not a hot blob but a cognac or marc, or just a grand crème and a croissant while admiring the way the French do market day so well. (There is also a superb 50m open-air heated pool below the cliff with a mermaid’s view of the castle as you swim.)

[‘Street Market, Walsall’ (undated) by William Herbert Allan (1863-1943)]

This brings me to one of the reasons I don’t just like markets for the shopping and the theatre of it all, I also think they are vital to the good functioning of a village, town, or city. Markets act like glue; I’ve no idea what academic studies show, but when you sit in a market square with a cup of coffee and observe the goings-on, it’s very clear what the benefits are. They are a focal point for the social and economic life of a place, a tangible network of contacts, a place for chats, surprise encounters, negotiation, laughter, not to mention vital sources of good-quality local produce. It’s interesting that in his brilliant book The English Town (1990), Mark Girouard’s first chapter is on on the market place as the beating heart of a town, and thirty-plus years ago he was already lamenting the fact that too many are now permanent car parks or ‘sad amorphous spaces’.

We are fortunate to have a daily market here in Cambridge with an excellent veg stall on Sundays where dirty Fen celery, muddy beetroot, long stalks of sprouts, and gloriously intricate cabbages appear in season, and the talk in the queue is worth the wait. So I find it amazing that we have allowed ourselves to be herded into supermarkets where we even have to grapple with self-checkouts when we could still have big, open, public, egalitarian, colourful markets. I was not surprised when Booths dropped the maddening self-checkouts after customers said they missed the human interaction at the manned tills. I also like the way a Dutch supermarket chain ahs introduced a kletskassa (‘chat checkout’) a slow lane for people who want a bit of chat. But nothing beats a good market

[‘To Catch a Thief’, 1955]

If it’s not market day, I’m also happy with a good market scene in a film. It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) has busy, rainy, black and white and grey scenes set in Petticoat Lane, and at the other end of the scale there is of course the gloriously over-tanned Cary Grant in a flower market in Nice being chased through thickets of Technicolor gladioli and carnations. Though judging from the painting below, the scene could just as easily have been filmed in Carlisle.

[‘Carlisle Covered Market’ (1958-59) by Margaret Harrison]

The fact is that, after eight hundred years - in some cases a thousand - we have already lost too many good, traditional markets, and many more are threatened. Some places are doing their best to regenerate, to bring in a motley crowd more used to sterile supermarkets, silent checkouts, and soulless on-line shopping to enjoy the noise, smells, and cash transactions. Bury Market even buses them in. But I hope the human aspect, the interaction, the physicality, the realness of markets all prevail, and I like to think that, like printed books, newspapers, and some branch lines, they will manage to survive and maybe even get better and better.

[‘The Market Porter pub, Borough Market’ (2019) by Liam O’Farrell, illustrating my points perfectly]

Of course, none of this precludes new markets being set up, and it’s always good to see them appear in railway arches or new squares or old market halls such as Borough Market. Sadly, though, most of these are in more affluent areas where the sourdough prices tell you a lot. But just imagine how great it would be if every town had its own market, big or small, as in France, and the huge number of positive knock-on effects it would create.

Plus, you never know who you might bump into at a market, haggling over fruit

[Hötorget, Stockholm, Oct 1963]

Happy Sunday!