The rather handsome Trowbridge Town Hall, Market Hall on the right
I grew up in a market town in Wiltshire, the kind that used to exist and now looks much the same as anywhere else. I remember the brown metal cattle pens in the carpark next to the karate club and the painted sign on the brick wall advertising the milk bar that was already long gone. Even in my teens most market towns in the West Country still had those waist-high cattle and sheep pens in the car parks, but they got in the way of cars so like the character of all those towns, they had to go. In Trowbridge the Market Hall had to go as well, changing the character of the town overnight.
The Market Hall had been built probably around 1880, a big Victorian stone building next to the old town hall and the municipal gardens, the War Memorial and the town park, where it should have been, at the centre of things. It seemed huge, with a gallery and a ring of stalls and booths and a central cluster of stalls as well. So far as I remember it was mostly a fruit and veg market, the place people went before Tesco sold them fruit they’d never heard of to throw away. There were stone flags on the floor, wooden dividers covered with posters for wrestling matches and pigeons roosting in the roof and flying up to the rafters.
It was the place I first saw Levi 501s on the Kevin’s Menswear stall, the place I first saw female nipples, albeit only on the poster of the girl eating an orange under the caption “Small ones are more juicy.” It was also the first time I saw market casuals, the people whose stalls moved around the market from week to week.
I only really learned how street markets worked years later, when I had a stall at Covent Garden as a casual and graduated to being “permanent” in Portobello Market. Casuals don’t have a regular pitch. Casuals go early and beg the Market Supervisor for a space to put their stall. They get moved around every week at the whim of the the Supervisor or if another casual becomes permanent. It’s not about money, but really about showing some commitment to the market, not wasting people’s time and not pissing off the Supervisor by not doing what you said you were going to do.
In markets like those, the ones with a buzz and lots of customers it kicks off early, maybe 5am or even earlier. If you’re the supervisor you’re first in and last out. You really don’t need to be messed about with people saying they’re coming to stall-out then not showing up, or worse, not showing up on time, arriving later and expecting everyone else to get out of the way so they can park or unload. No-one likes it, no-one needs it.
If you think markets are rough and ready and full of crooks, go along as a casual and see how it works in a really busy one. Ask to help out on someone’s stall, just to see. You will rarely meet more honest hard-working people who genuinely look out for each other.
I’ve always loved markets. Chapel Market was less than 100 yards from my first flat in Islington, back when prehistoric yuppies still took their chances with big blokes with very short hair, blue suits and dark ties of a Saturday lunchtime in Liverpool Road pubs. And reader, I know, for I was one.
It was a time when the Business Design Centre was the derelict Agricultural Hall while The Agricultural Hall pub was a shrine to the Richardson gang, the Krays’s rivals and the air was blue with cigarette smoke down to knee level. When I first moved out of London I went to St Albans market every Saturday to get veg, bread and of course, cheese from the man who inspired me about it, who introduced me to Saval and who died out cycling, falling dead at the side of the road.
Markets had their own atmosphere, their own characters and their own rules. I can still remember buildings on Liverpool open to the sky, used to store market barrows and haunted by the flapping wings of pigeons and a hundred years of graft. I remember the dark-haired woman with the best veg on Chapel Market who seemed to know the details of every police operation in the area; the tea-man who sold 50 different kinds of tea, whose father turned-down the chance to buy four houses in Barnsbury for a grand because he couldn’t see how anyone could ever make any money on them. And I remember what happened when someone pushed into one of the queues at a stall in the market.
Samantha Fox - she'll catch her death of cold.
One women had been queueing for ages at one of the stalls where you knew it was good stuff by the number of people queueing for it. But then, this was a market where competition ruled without any of the non-compete nonsense that plagues a lot of farmers markets, assuming either that customers can’t tell quality or the stall holders can’t cope with real life. A little old lady pushed in front of her, so she asked the little old lady to please not. Little old lady refused and told the stall holder what she wanted, so the woman who’d been queue-jumped asked her, loudly, exactly why she expected to be able to queue-jump.
What happened next could have come straight from a Dick Van Dyke film.
Five different male stall-holders popped-out from behind their stalls and told her with one voice: “Because she’s Sammy Fox’s Gran!”
You never get that in supermarkets.
