Queen's Market, also known as Queen's Road Market and Green Street Market, is a historic street market located in the London Borough of Newham. This vibrant market has a rich history, reflecting the diverse communities that have shaped its identity over the decades.
Origins and Early Years
The street market originated in Green Street, at the boundary between East Ham and West Ham, during the late Victorian era when the new suburb of East Ham began to develop. Originally, the stall holders were English Cockney, Gypsy communities, and Jewish traders from Whitechapel and the East End, selling clothing and vegetables.
In 1904, the traders were moved into Queen's Road to prevent them from obstructing the main road and to allow the passage of trams.
Transformation and Cultural Shift
Since the late 1960s and 1970s, South Asians from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Asian-Africans started moving families into homes locally and set up stalls and shops along Green Street and inside Queen's Market. Today, Queen's Market has a specialist retail offer of South Asian and African food and textiles.
Architectural Evolution
In the 1960s, the mock-Brutalist exterior around the market's space frame structure was covered with a roof, making it one of London's few covered street markets.
Read also: Experience Fad's Fine African Cuisine
Popularity and Community Impact
The market is popular, serving visitors beyond Newham, and remains the most successful publicly owned street market in Newham. Back on the high street, it's the chain stores that look out of place. This is a neighbourhood that values independent shops.
Their cherished market and the traders, some of whom have been here for many years, are at the heart of the community. I have the impression that the Friends of Queens Market aren’t going to take their collective eye off the market for a second.
Rhyl’s NEW Queen’s Market
The One Pound Fish Man
A notable trader at the Queen's is Muhammad Shahid Nazir, more commonly known as the One Pound Fish Man. He rose to fame as a fish trader at the Queen's Market through his composition of a market trader's song. It became a viral hit through shoppers at the Queen's Market recording him and uploading to YouTube.
Challenges and Preservation Efforts
The Friends of Queens Market say ‘‘the planning system has haunted Queen’s Market since 2004’’. It's thanks to The Friends of Queens Market that the market is still here.
In a fight lasting for ten years, they headed a campaign to see off a development plan that would have changed the face of the market in favour of luxury flats. They managed to get the market designated as an asset of community value but their fight is ongoing.
Read also: The Story Behind Cachapas
A market balances on a toothpick. They’re fragile things, encompassing the entirety of the local community who shop and supports it, in addition to the stall holders and framework that keep the market going. Make changes, and it can all snap and fall.
It’s one thing to want to improve infrastructure; mend the roof, improve the lighting, bring in new stalls, clean the market every week. It’s quite another to want to make the market smaller and put luxury flats on top of it.
Exploring the Market Today
If you emerge from Upton Park station onto Green Street, the shops are like male peacocks, displaying a dazzling range of saris and materials, gold jewellery, and new season mangos. It's a thriving, vibrant mixture of small shops, cafes and restaurants.
Walk inside to the vast hanger of a market, slightly underlit and ragged around the edges where the colours on the stalls light up the space. On a rainy Tuesday lunchtime the market is packed, serving the predominantly Asian population.
The first stalls sell materials, rolls of brightly coloured cloth. Buttons, ribbons, oil cloth in tempting arrays. I can never resist a haberdashery stall. Next there are clothing stalls including a natty array of Hawaiian shirts.
Read also: Techniques of African Jewellery
Tables are covered with shiny kitchenware. Aluminium cooking pots, tagines, electrical goods. Book-ending the centrally placed stalls; butchers shops. A fish market. General grocers selling huge sacks of rice. It knows what it is, no pretensions. Queens Market is all about the bargain, serving what the community wants.
Most vegetable stalls display variations of the same products with price and quality differing. The butchers are crowded. The only empty one has a big red and white pork sign.
Walk further down the market, and the fruit and vegetable stalls emerge. Huge bunches and boxes of fenugreek, coriander, dill, mint and many other herbs I don’t recognise. Three categories of root ginger of differing quality with prices to match.
Bags of onions from India. Several types of aubergines. A mix of bowl sellers and by the box and kilo. It’s a joy to see a crocodile of high vis clad wide eyed toddlers being led around the market by their teachers, being shown different fruits and vegetables.
Emerge into the light at the back of the market where a parade of fruit and vegetable sellers have customers lining up to examine and buy their produce.
