“Jesus didn’t go to Tesco,” says Russell Dryden, fishmonger and manager of the Blue Bermondsey business improvement district. “He went to the marketplace.” Markets, in other words, aren’t just places for buying and selling things, but also for meeting people, exchanging ideas, sometimes for starting world religions. But their survival can’t always be taken for granted, for which reason he and his allies in the local community have been fighting for years to revive the one where they work and shop.
He is standing by his stall in the Blue Market, a south-east London institution that at its 19th-century peak had 200 stalls. Behind him is a new clock tower, a perky fusion of pyramidal roof and horseshoe arches that hints at the architecture of other places – Moorish? Japanese? – without quite stating which. The silvery scales that clad its oak-framed structure catch the shifting autumnal light. Around are thoughtful and playful but budget-conscious interventions by a collaboration between Hayatsu Architects, a practice with a predilection for working in timber, and the Turner prize-winning collective Assemble.
The market, like the area around it, has had its ups and downs. Bermondsey is an ancient place, formed around pilgrimage routes to a medieval abbey, then transformed beyond recognition by railways and shipping. It was once the “larder of London”, a hub of food production and trading, location of the world’s first commercial cannery and of a huge biscuit factory, a place from where custard and malt vinegar and other delights were dispatched to kitchen tables across the country. Most of this industry, along with nearby docks, has disappeared. By 2018, the number of stalls in the market had dropped to four. A 2005 Metropolitan police report called the area a hotspot for “race crime and youth disorder”.
The Blue Market owes its name to a pub called the Blue Anchor, which may be something to do with the anchorites who gave spiritual counsel to pilgrims, for whom blue would have been a sacred colour. Its stalls used to line what is in effect the area’s high street, before being relocated in the 1970s to a triangular plaza in a new development. That it was a somewhat sterile place, ill connected to the pattern of surrounding streets, did nothing to help the market’s fortunes.
Dryden, who has been selling fish here for 40 years, teamed up with other traders and local citizens to do something about it. They went through the long, slow grind common to projects to improve public spaces, of much chat and consultation, of thwarted plans, of insufficient funding. “You get £50,000 and you think ‘yippee’,” says Dryden. “But what’s £50,000? Nothing. You need a real chunk.” Eventually, they were offered £2m from the Good Growth Fund, a regeneration programme run by the mayor of London. It was enough to pay for the makeover designed by Hayatsu and Assemble.
The clock tower is the most visible of a series of interventions in and around the market. Artful signs around the neighbourhood draw attention to it. Routes to nearby places are being opened up or improved; for example, to a big housing development that is coming to the former Peek Frean biscuit factory. It is also hoped to attract some of the energy of Maltby Street, a thriving food market about a mile along the railway line towards the centre of London. The roller shutters on traders’ lock-ups have been beautified with hand-painted accounts of Bermondsey’s history. Recycled building materials have been made into a mottled and marbled drinking fountain. Oak-framed canopies give shelter to the traders.
There’s an emphasis on the way things are made, wherever possible by local businesses, on the jointing of the timber and the shining discs of the tower’s cladding, which, it turns out, are the bases of paint cans made in a nearby factory. A stall was set up in the market where passers-by could engrave images of local history on to them. There’s also thrift, as it turns out that £2m isn’t all that much, especially once a large part of it has gone on making local roads more pedestrian-friendly. Old concrete bollards are stained red and made into seating and existing trees are made to look less straggly and more verdant by the careful addition of planting around them. Much relies on paint and graphics, by the Bermondsey-based Stinsensqueeze.
The result is a hybrid space in which the artful interventions co-exist with the municipal modernism of the 1970s development and the Millwall and England flags of a neighbouring bar. A wiry statue of a lion, installed a few years ago, has after some debate been retained. The place is charming and relaxed and not quite like anywhere else. The care and thought of its creation are palpable. It looks fragile – you feel trepidatious for its fate at the hands of graffitists and careless vehicles – but in Dryden’s view: “If something’s nice, people leave it alone.” In which case its delicacy will be a welcome alternative to the tough war-zone materials preferred by local authorities for places such as this.
This country has plenty of futile and undernourished attempts to upgrade public spaces, not least because – for all that there’s widespread agreement as to their importance – the budgets for their improvement are skimpy. The Blue Market seems more thought and felt. What it needs now is for new stallholders to come, whom Dryden and his fellow campaigners are actively encouraging. He is confident that people will still want to buy and sell in the outdoors. “I think the human spirit is too strong. You go back to ancient Sumeria. You always have markets.”
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