Columbia Road Market

Once a genteel country hamlet, by the 19^th century Bethnal Green had grown to become one of London’s very poorest areas – a report of 1868 stated that: “A large part of the population, at the best of times, is on the verge of pauperism”. In 1861, the social commentator and manager of the Gaiety Theatre, John Hollingshead, described Columbia Road’s denizens as “mainly poor dock labourers… poor silk-weavers… the lowest kind of thieves… the women mainly hawkers, seamstresses, the coarsest of prostitutes and aged stall-keepers.”

In 1869, Lady Burdett-Coutts, famous heiress and benefactor of the Victorian era, turned her attention to Bethnal Green. With encouragement from her friend Charles Dickens, she constructed a huge, purpose-built covered market in High Gothic style, a project in which she was to invest £200,000. She was concerned that the tolls collected at other London markets were pushing up the price of food and poorer people were therefore being cheated. The aim of her project was to bring cheap food to the people without the intervention of ‘middle men’, as she described it: “to supply the surrounding poor with wholesome food at a fair rate; to bring the producer and consumer into closer communication with each other; and to promote habits of industry and thrift among the humblest class of traders.”

Covering two acres and designed by Henry Darbishire, the site comprised an enclosed quadrangle, with a lofty market hall on one side and on the other three an arcaded cloister offering further shop space. The central area could accommodate up to 400 open-air stalls. The entire building was elaborately ornamented, with turrets, Tudor arches and carving on almost every available surface. By deliberately making the building as lavish as possible, Burdett-Coutts could achieve her aim of providing as much local employment as possible in the project’s construction. Flats above the stalls provided homes for the traders and the complex even had its own church, swimming pool and baths, as well as the luxury of a laundry on the fifth floor.

Yet for all Coutts’ undoubted good intentions, it soon became apparent that the Columbia Road market was a huge flop. It failed not just because of opposition by vested interests (the ‘middle men’ whom Coutts had wanted to cut out) but, more interestingly, because “local habit preferred the raucous gaiety of the established street markets… [and] because the barrow-boys found the atmosphere of moral uplift discouragingly strong”. The prospect of working every day in a building adorned with admonitory signs and slogans such as “Be sober, be vigilant, be pitiful, be courteous”, and posters warning against swearing and spitting, was not an attractive one for the costermongers. From a purely practical perspective, the market traders just thought it was too grand and not adapted to their purposes. Simple things like not having any posts to bang a nail into, showed up the disconnect between Coutts’ grand philanthropic vision and the day-to-day realities of life as a street seller.

Despite its initial lack of success, attempts were made to relaunch Columbia Road as a fish market, with cheap fish coming in from the then thriving east coast ports. But this venture also failed as it depended on a new railway line coming out of Bishopsgate station, plans for which were shelved after planning objections.

In 1886, the market closed for good, with street traders moving on to their preferred traditional sites in Petticoat Lane and Roman Road. The building came into its own briefly during the Blitz, when its spacious cellars served well as an air raid shelter. After the war it was used for storage but was then demolished in 1960, to be replaced by Ravenscourt Park and a tower block named (aptly) Old Market Square.

 

All that remains of Columbia Road market today is a section of railing and a pair of gateposts which stand outside the local nursery school. The once grand edifice, the ‘grand projet’ of rich benefactors who thought they knew what was best for the ‘little people’ has gone down in history - to quote the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner - as “one of the great follies of the Victorian age”.

 

 

 

References:

Public Good by private Means: how philanthropy shapes Britain by Rhodri Davies (2016)

Website: http://eastlondonhistory.com/2010/11/10/columbia-road-history/

My East End by Anita Dobbs (1987)

The East End of London by Millicent Rose (1951)

Columbia Market, Bethnal Green (Illustrated London News 1st May 1869)