Broadway Market: A Neighborhood Saturday Market in London's Hackney
Say "Broadway" and you picture neon, musicals and tickets people save up for half a year. The London borough of Hackney has a Broadway of its own - and in its whole history it has never staged a single show. It most likely earned the name simply by being wider than the lanes around it: just wide enough for a herd of cattle to pass through.
Broadway Market is a neighborhood street market in Hackney, on a street between London Fields park and Regent's Canal that fills up every Saturday with more than 150 stalls - farm produce, street food running from British cuisine to half the world, plus crafts, flowers and old records.
Where the Cattle Came Through
The street was once part of a drovers' road: drovers walked their herds down it from Essex to a last stretch of grazing before slaughter at Smithfield. The market took hold at the end of the 19th century - in 1893 the street held 35 stalls selling fruit, vegetables, fish and meat, supplying the working-class East End with everything you could put on the table for dinner. For most of its history Broadway Market was an ordinary everyday market where people shopped to fill a bag - it only became a weekend food pilgrimage this century.
How Broadway Market Nearly Got Torn Down
Then came the supermarkets. Through the 1970s and 80s the market was fading, stalls kept disappearing and there was even talk of demolition. Help didn't come from the top: in 2004 the council handed the market over to an association of local traders and residents, and on May 8 it launched a Saturday farmers' market. It caught on. It was hardly idyllic, though. Just a year later locals occupied the old cafe building in protest at the way the council was selling off council housing - and when they were cleared out a few days before Christmas, they were sitting inside again between Christmas and New Year. Gentrification came here with everything it brings, resistance included.
Saturday Between the Park and the Canal
Seven days a week only the permanent shops and cafes along the street are open - the stalls belong to Saturday, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and a much shorter Sunday market has been added recently. Anyone who wants to sell here waits about two years for a stall - that's how long the waiting list is. On Saturdays two smaller neighbors join in as well, Netil Market and the market in the local school playground, so a single street suddenly turns into a whole circuit of markets.
The ritual is simple: buy whatever smells good - hog roast, oysters, pastries - and carry it off to the grass in London Fields or to the edge of the canal. Among London's markets it stands apart: compared with Borough Market you can actually breathe here and stop for a coffee, and compared with Camden Market nothing here is playing at being alternative. Farmers' markets in Czech towns took off on the same principle a few years later - just without the oysters.
A Sandwich in the Rain
The last time I made it to the market it was raining, the way it does in London - and the stalls minded it no more than the locals did. I couldn't resist a toasted sandwich with cheddar, bacon, arugula and mustard: the cheese stretched until I tore it, the bread held its crunch, the bacon and the mustard fought each other for attention and the arugula kept the whole thing in check. It cost 7.50 GBP (8 EUR) and it was superb - the photo shows only half of it, the other half never made it into the photo. You don't have to hunt down tickets for this Broadway half a year in advance. Just turn up on Saturday.
Broadway Market
