Lost London, page 14
56 Columbia Market in 1958, just before demolition. By the mid-nineteenth century, London’s authorised food markets – including Billingsgate, Covent Garden, Leadenhall, Smithfield, and Spitalfields – were becoming overwhelmed by population growth. Their emphasis was on wholesaling, supplying not only the city’s expanding range of shops and restaurants but also the street stalls of small shopkeepers and an army of street hawkers and costermongers, who would rely on the daily surplus stock at the wholesale markets. At Spitalfields, for example, costermongers had to wait until 9 a.m., after the retail greengrocers had already made their purchases, to buy what was left. As social reformer Charles Booth noted, the role and significance of costermongers in distributing food from the wholesale markets to London’s working-class districts led in turn to a proliferation of unauthorised open-air kerbside markets.
The first and proper business of the coster is to push his barrow and sell his goods from street to street; but it has come about that itinerant vendors, seeking their customers, gather together in certain places during a portion of the day or evening, and in these places their customers finally learn to look for them. Thus the circle is complete, and an informal, unauthorised market is the result.1
Saturday night and Sunday markets were the busiest because Saturday was pay day. Henry Mayhew, documenting the lives of London’s poor in 1851, described how London’s costermongers gathered into no fewer than thirty-seven unauthorised but highly organised street markets, the majority of which lay in working-class districts outside the City.2 In Bethnal Green, the main street markets were in Brick Lane, Club Row, Sclater Street and Bethnal Green Road.3 The 1851 census had recorded 3,723 ‘hawkers, hucksters and pedlars’ in London as a whole, but the real figure was probably closer to ten times that amount. One way or another, a significant proportion of London’s day-to-day shopping took place on the streets and in street markets. There was not much that could be bought in shops that could not also be had – probably at a lower price – from a market stall. In addition to fruit and vegetables, fresh meat and fish, the markets sold practical necessities such as crockery, bootlaces, hats, matches, razors, clothes-pegs and brooms; street food such as pies, baked potatoes and pea soup; pets such as dogs, cats and birds; and novelties and luxuries that included trinkets, stationery and cigars. Mayhew described the atmosphere of the markets:
Here is a stall glittering with new tin saucepans; there another, bright with its blue and yellow crockery, and sparkling with white glass. Now you come to a row of old shoes arranged along the pavement . . . This stall is green and white with bunches of turnips – that red with apples, the next yellow with onions, and another purple with pickling cabbages . . . Go to whatever corner of the metropolis you please . . . and there is the same shouting and the same struggling to get the penny profit out of the poor man’s Sunday dinner.4
The economic historian Colin Smith suggests that street markets and street trading performed a vital role during the most rapid phase of industrialisation, when demand ran ahead of retail capacity.5
The performative aspect of street markets – the persuasive patter of vendors and the participation of a good-natured crowd – gave them a vibrancy that became a distinctive aspect of London’s social landscape. Historian Victoria Kelley notes that ‘for the working-class public they were an essential, and even loved, part of everyday life, the source not just of cheap food and commodities, but of sensory stimulation and social interaction, of pleasure and leisure, and of complex notions about what London was, what it looked like, and what it meant to be a Londoner’.6 The bulk of the middle and upper classes saw things differently: as places of disorder and chaos, and a magnet for the worst elements in society.7 Reformists, unnerved by the raucous social behaviour and petty crime that flourished in the congested markets, fearful of the insanitary conditions, and offended by the daily accumulation of litter, vegetable trimmings, fish offal, chickens’ heads and entrails, campaigned for the regulation and repression of street markets.8 In 1867 the Metropolitan Streets Act imposed maximum dimensions for market stalls of 9 feet (2.7 metres) in length and 3 feet (90 cm) in depth, and police constables on their daily beat did their best to ensure that roadways remained open to traffic and that pavements were free of obstruction.
But it was increasingly apparent that the ideal solution was to enclose and cover market stalls, bringing them directly under the management of municipal authorities who could control rents and opening hours and monitor hygienic conditions. By mid-century, several provincial cities had already built impressive market halls, including Liverpool (St John’s Market, 1822), Newcastle (Grainger Market, 1835), Bolton (Bolton Market Hall, 1854), Manchester (Shudehill Market, 1854), Leeds (Kirkgate Market, 1857) and Stockport (Stockport Market Hall, 1861). These new market halls were widely seen as symbols of political, moral and social advancement, not only of the physical environment and public health but also of working-class tastes and morals. They became a measure of the town’s progressiveness, independence and economic self-sufficiency, ‘a test of the town’s responsiveness to the needs of its citizens’.9 But not in London. London’s wholesale markets were brought under cover one by one, but it was not until the 1860s that entrepreneurs and reform-minded philanthropists began to develop proposals for retail market halls in London. Most proposals came to nothing; Columbia Market, Bethnal Green, was an exception, funded by the super-wealthy Angela Burdett-Coutts.
Burdett-Coutts was the daughter of the radical MP Sir Francis Burdett and heir to the Coutts banking fortune. The focus of her philanthropy was the East End poor. She funded soup kitchens, night shelters, a Ragged School and a Home for Fallen Women, and helped destitute boys enlist in the Royal Navy. In the early 1850s she acquired a large, derelict site in the Nova Scotia Gardens area of Bethnal Green on which to build ‘model’ lodgings for the working poor. Charles Dickens assisted her by carrying out much of the preliminary work of arranging for surveys and plans.10 Dickens advocated flats, which would also be able to provide gas, water, drainage and ‘a variety of other humanising things which you can’t give them so well in little houses’.11 By the time the site had been cleared ready for building, the relationship between Dickens and Burdett-Coutts had cooled; Henry Darbishire was hired as the architect. His design for what would be called Columbia Square was in the Gothic style that appealed to Burdett-Coutts for its contemporary associations with patriotism and religion. The project opened in 1862: four five-storey blocks stood around a square with a large Gothic clock tower. Each block contained forty-five flats with communal corridors running the entire length of the block on each floor. Gas and water were supplied, and a resident superintendent and two porters kept the corridors and staircases clean. Rents were set at levels that would barely bring a return on the investment: it was a moralising kind of philanthropy, an overtly paternalistic exercise in stabilising the lives of the potentially rebellious, infectious poor.
Columbia Market was the next step in Burdett-Coutts’ efforts to impose order on the anarchy and harshness of East End life, drawing costermongers into a more controlled environment where they could be supervised and so less able to pass off underweight, inferior or adulterated goods. As the Illustrated London News put it, ‘The beneficent objects Miss Coutts has in view in establishing the market are to supply the surrounding poor with wholesome food at a fair rate; to bring the producer and consumer into closer communication with each other; and to promote habits of industry and thrift among the humblest class of traders.’12 Having secured an Act of Parliament to establish a market next to her model dwellings in Columbia Square, Burdett-Coutts again employed Henry Darbishire as the architect; and again he worked with a rich Gothic palette, drawing heavily on medieval Flemish precedents to create a carefully scripted, money-is-no-object market complex. Cathedral-like in scale and palatial in form, it was tone deaf and deeply incongruous amid the slums and semi-slums of the East End.
Darbishire’s scheme consisted of a large enclosed courtyard with a vast arched wrought-iron gate on one side and a huge market hall on the other. Arcaded cloisters lined the interior façades of the buildings, which were constructed with greyish-yellow and grey-blue bricks and roofs of green slate. The detailing was lavish, with generous use of wrought iron, teak, Irish marble, coloured granite, white stone carved to represent saints and medieval figures, and terracotta moulded in foliage patterns.13 Around the courtyard, texts carved in Gothic script adjured people to ‘Be Sober, Be Pitiful, Be Vigilant, Be Courteous.’ By the time of its completion in 1869 Columbia Market was estimated to have cost between £150,000 and £250,000 (roughly £15–25 million in 2025). The formal opening was very much in keeping with Victorian celebrations of other innovative public institutions such as waterworks and sewage pumping stations. People expected flags and streamers, parades, and lavish ceremonies attended by dignitaries, merchants and schoolchildren, who would all be treated to flowery speeches celebrating a commitment to progressive reform. In this vein, Columbia Market opened on 29 April 1869 to ‘an immense assembly’ that included Lord Mayor, the Dean and Canons of Westminster, the Duchess of Cambridge, the Duke of Wellington and the Duchess of Argyll.14 Bands played (the band of the H division of police, and the band of the Coldstream Guards), prayers were offered up by the Bishop of London, and hymns were sung; the Archbishop of Canterbury gave a speech and Burdett-Coutts was presented with feather-flowers by a group of young girls.
57 Columbia Market, south-west corner on Crab Tree Road, 1870. 58 Columbia Market, eastern façade, 1870. Darbishire had given great thought to the layout and functioning of the market. Different parts of the market were to be devoted to different kinds of produce, and different spaces were designed to accommodate an unofficial classification of first-, second-, third- and fourth-class tenants. The main market hall in the centre of the north wing was divided into about eighty retail units, each with a fireplace, a sink, a marble counter and a desk; galleries, above, were designated for the sale of fruit and flowers. On either side were some large shops with an office and private entrance on the ground floor, a sitting room and four bedrooms on the stories above, and a kitchen, cellar and storerooms in the basement. They were intended for first-class dealers, with preference given to farmers and market gardeners, thus cutting out the middle-man and keeping prices down. There was a tavern, The Market, in the north-eastern corner of the complex, and a large market yard behind the north wing. In the east and west wings of the complex there were smaller shops, with accommodation above intended for lease by City clerks and dealers. There were still more positions in the covered third-rate stalls of the south wing, either side of the grand entrance on Crab Tree Row (renamed Columbia Road in 1874), and space for up to four hundred stalls in the open-air courtyard, intended for costermongers who could bring in their own barrows or rent one from the market’s stores on favourable terms. The courtyard was paved with blue granite, divided by lines of pink granite into 6-foot-square (1.8-metre-square) spaces, to encourage the orderly arrangement of costermongers’ barrows. In the centre of the courtyard was a decorative fountain, surrounded by four granite basins with hydrants for washing.
Commissioned by a philanthropist driven by upper-middle-class conceptions of social order, public morals and commercial probity; designed by an architect with little or no ‘street’ knowledge; and run by a committee more familiar with charities than markets: it was perhaps no wonder that Columbia Market failed. The shocking surprise was that the failure was evident so quickly: six months after opening, the Columbia Market was forced to close. Boycotted by wholesalers and shunned by costermongers who were uncomfortable with the scale and magnificence of the building and its censorious texts, resentful of the heavy fines imposed for swearing, and derisive of the ban on Sunday trading – the day traditionally used for shopping in the East End – the market struggled from the start. Charles Dickens pointed out, in hindsight, that Columbia Market was relatively inaccessible from the Thames wharves, the city’s railway termini and its major wholesaling markets. Those vendors who did take pitches in the new market found that competition from unauthorised street markets proved unassailable and that footfall in the posh new setting was insufficient to sustain profitable trading. Customers, too, seemed to prefer the old ways; and many of them, given that so many women worked and lacked facilities for cooking, and so relied on prepared street food from pie, baked potato and jellied eel vendors. Chastened, Burdett-Coutts sought to better understand the habits and preferences of Bethnal Green tradesmen and inhabitants. She promptly commissioned the construction of a new building, with stalls and stables to accommodate costermongers’ barrows and horses. The architectural ostentation that had not gone down well was abandoned: this was a functional building that provided costermongers with space to store their wares and a place for their animals in well-ventilated stables furnished with manure-pits, drinking taps and washing facilities.
In 1870, Columbia Market was reopened as a fish market. The courtyard was roofed over with a lightweight iron-and-glass structure and the granite flooring covered in asphalt. Gas lighting was installed and stalls were provided rent-free to wholesalers and retailers. Burdett-Coutts even subsidised East Anglian fishers in her efforts to kick-start some degree of success, and there were plans to develop a rail connection from East Anglia on the Eastern Counties Railway – but to no avail. Billingsgate dealers, with the advantage of a Thames-side location and well-established supply chains, were able to retain their grip on London’s fish market.
Management of Columbia Market was transferred to the City of London in 1871, but a year later there were only forty-one tenants and in 1874 the corporation, out of ideas, handed it back to Burdett-Coutts – now Baroness Burdett-Coutts, in recognition of her philanthropic spending. From 1877 to 1878 the market was partially occupied by the American Meat Market;15 but once again the absence of a railway connection and the comparative advantage of the established wholesale market in Smithfield (which had only been redeveloped in the 1860s) led to failure. By this time, all hope of making Columbia Market a going concern had disappeared. By 1898 it had fallen into disuse except for a small wholesale potato trade and a shop occupied by a cabinet maker.16 Meanwhile, Bethnal Green’s traditional, unauthorised street markets flourished. According to a 1893 survey by the recently formed London County Council (LCC), there were 83 stalls in Brick Lane south of Bethnal Green Road, 131 stalls in Bethnal Green Road, 28 in Hackney Road and 63 in Green Street. Across the rest of the city there were more than a hundred other street markets: a considerable increase on the thirty-seven in Mayhew’s day, even taking into account the rapid rise in London’s population across intervening decades. The LCC’s survey report characterised the street markets as both a ‘serious nuisance’ and a ‘disgrace’, yet also ‘most useful’, ‘the means by which the surplus produce remaining unsold in the authorised markets are distributed among the poorer classes’.17 The LCC seriously considered housing street markets in new market buildings, with sample designs drawn up for three pilot schemes; but on further reflection – and no doubt with the dramatic failure of the privately subsidised Columbia Market in mind – the idea was quietly dropped in favour of a licensing system, introduced in 1927 and underpinned with a regulatory framework. By 1932, the LCC had issued 1,282 licences to street traders in Bethnal Green, including 435 for human foodstuffs, 749 for non-foodstuffs and 75 for livestock (‘the latter includes pigeons, canaries, tortoises, rabbits, geese, etc.’). Charles Bennett, the Chair of Bethnal Green’s Public Health Committee, noted that:
59 The opening of Columbia Fish Market, illustration for the Illustrated London News, 5 March 1870. the Club Row dog and bird market held on Sunday mornings is an institution known to fanciers all over the kingdom; of lesser fame, but household words in the metropolis, are our Hare Street ‘junk’ markets, Columbia Road plant and flower market, and Cygnet Street wireless, gramophone and motor car accessories market. These Sunday markets are crowded to suffocation point, and the narrow old streets where they are held are frequented by many thousands of individuals who jostle their way through in what is to them a normal way of spending Sunday morning.18
Meanwhile the LCC had acquired the Columbia Market complex for use as stores and offices. It was used as a shelter during the Second World War, but by the 1950s it was mostly disused and in a state of considerable disrepair. Mark Girouard, in Country Life, described it this way in 1958: ‘These buildings have now all the romance and pathos of decay. The arcades are blocked up or cluttered with packing cases; the courtyard is a mess of sheds and lorries; the windows are dirty and broken; the dusky cathedral aisles of the hall are piled with stores and timber, and filled with the rustle of wings and the gentle and interminable cooing of the pigeons in the roof.’19
