London’s Street Markets: The Shifting Interiors of Informal Architecture

Abstract

This paper examines London’s street markets as overlooked sites of consumer modernity, ‘complex interiors’ that were contested and contradictory spaces within the city. It asks whether the street markets can be seen as ‘architecture’, arguing that, despite their outdoor locations, shifting form, and lack of built infrastructure, the street markets achieved a sense of enclosure and interiority through the particular qualities of their lights, sounds and their crowded occupation of space. The street markets produced complexity as a result of their informality, as a-legal and organic outbreaks of micro-entrepreneurship. The paper covers the 1850–1939 period and examines the specific example of Chrisp Street market in Poplar. In the post-war period, this was formalised as Lansbury Market and relocated into a planned market square. It thus usefully casts light back on the earlier period, as an example of what happened when street markets moved from informal to planned status.