Petticoat Lane Market

Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petticoat_Lane_Market

Today I paid a quick visit to visit Petticoat Lane Market. This East-End market has been going for hundreds of years in some form or another and I've heard about its "1000s of stalls". Hoping to see the market is at its largest I'd saved up the visit until today - Sunday.

I arrived at Liverpool Street station and easily found signs pointing down Middlesex Street.
Middlesex Street was originally called Petticoat Lane and has been the home of the market since around the 1750s. Apparently the road was renamed by the Victorians in 1830 to the avoid referring to ladies undergarments!

In retrospect I'm not sure what I was expecting from the market. Perhaps the charm of market stall holders calling out to advertise their wares, perhaps the chance of finding a magical assortment of goods on offer... What I found was not very impressive. Maybe it was the cold weather, maybe it was the time of year, or the time of day, but what I found was a sad spectacle.

The stalls that I first encountered mainly sold clothes. There were cheap suits and shirts, cheap shoes, cheap dresses etc. I thought "OK, maybe this is the clothes section of this enormous market... I'll continue on to the other areas!". I carried on down the road and saw the same goods on sale at different stalls, the same layout being used, the same frowning stall holders either silently watching the passers-by or aggressively barking out prices.

I made it all the way to the other end of Middlesex Street and all I found were clothes stalls, but with the occasional cheap electronic accessories stall, one or two hot-food stalls. At this point I was quite disappointed. The market didn't seem as large as I'd read and the things on sale all looked like they'd come from one or two distributors. For example there were lots of stalls all selling identically packed shirts:
To give them the benefit of the doubt I went down the market's other street - Wentworth Street. This again was mainly clothes, with a CD stall and a household goods stall thrown in. Pretty quickly I reached the end of the market in that direction and realised I'd seen it all.

My anticipated images of colourful characters and wondrous goods on offer had evaporated away. I stood looking at the other market customers. As well as the poor locals there were a few richer-looking tourists / students / middle-class onlookers who looked just as disappointed as me - where was this amazing market they'd read about?

I worked my way back through the market towards Liverpool Street. On the upside, I had seen a few friendly stall-holders who were calling out their wares and having a joke with each other. On the whole, however, these were lost amongst the other stall holders who stood silently staring out, often somewhat menacingly.My experience is perhaps best summed up by an incident I witnessed just as I was leaving the market. A Spanish woman tourist had unzipped a coat that was hanging on display at a stall. She then walked away without zipping it back up - no big deal really. The local stall-holder's response was to call her back to the stall and shout at her about how "If you downt zip it up it'll fall on da floor!". She started to helpfully zip it back up but the stall-holder grabbed it off her saying "I'll do it!". Understandably the woman left the stall and continued down the street but as I passed the stall-holder I could hear him violently muttering about "The type of people you get nowadays! Oh Gawd!". On my visit I'd felt just about as welcome as that woman...

Summary: A pale shadow of its former glory.