Petticoat Lane

I have vivid memories of being dragged several times a year to Petticoat Lane for the Sunday morning market. Back then, at the tender age of nine or ten, it seemed to me a very long way to go just to buy clothes, but for my fashion-conscious older sister ‘The Lane’ was a mecca… and I made a useful bag carrier! We never met Alan Sugar though, who apparently started his sales career on the market, boiling and selling beetroot...

In the Middle Ages, ‘The Lane’, as it’s always been known to locals, was a tree-lined country road called Hog’s Lane. By the 1590s, it was an established thoroughfare with several nice houses, though still surrounded by fields. In the early part of the 17^th century, the area had become a Spanish enclave and old maps of this time show the road as ‘Peticote Lane’,

presumably because it was by now a centre for the sale of old clothes. This part of east London already had an association with clothing, with dyeing a local industry. The plague of 1665 drove out the well-to-do from the area and property prices fell dramatically. The vacated homes of the rich were taken over by small businessmen and immigrants, notably Huguenot weavers fleeing persecution in France. Before long, they too became involved in the manufacture and sale of clothes and woven goods, and the market started to take the shape it still has to this day.
In 1830, because it was felt that naming a street after a female undergarment was unseemly, Petticoat Lane was re-named Middlesex Street, forming as it did the traditional boundary between the City and the East End. At this time, only Sundays were given over to the rag trade. The rest of the week was for the sale of day-to-day household goods: food, fruit, gas mantles, fried fish, cooking oil etc.

Petticoat Lane in 1870

The market flourished during the Victorian age, sufficient for Watts Phillips, author of The Wild Tribes of London (!) to describe the area as “a perfect sea of greasy bargainers”.

Jewish clothes seller

From 1882, a wave of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe settled in the area. The chapels, which had previously served the Huguenot community, were adapted as synagogues. These new immigrants also entered the local garment industry and maintained the traditions of the market. They became a familiar and distinctive sight, hats piled high on their heads and clothes draped over their arms as they walked the streets, carrying out their deals in a language that was half Yiddish and half Cockney. By the 1900s, the street had been much widened and the market had grown in all directions. The majority of the stallholders were now Jewish. But the moral climate of the time was such that many people frowned on Sunday trading, and there were numerous attempts to halt the now famous Petticoat Lane Sunday market. Some of these were none too subtle, with buses and fire engines being driven through the crowds in an attempt to break things up! In 1936, the authorities bowed to the inevitable, and the Lane became protected by an Act of Parliament.

Petticoat Lane market was almost obliterated during WW2 when a V2 bomb fell on Spitalfields

in November 1944, causing widespread damage. But it survived, and these days ‘The Lane’ is as popular as ever, open every day but Saturday, and spreading into surrounding Wentworth, Toynbee and Goulston Streets. The old Jewish names - Polly Nathan’s Fish Shop, Tubby Isaacs’ Eel Stall, the Old Clothes Exchange and Simmons and Levy’s – have now all gone, replaced by more exotic Asian ones reflecting changing character of this vibrant part of East London.

 

References:

The London Encyclopedia ed. Ben Weinreb (2008)

London’s East End Jane Cox (1994)

The East End Richard Tames (2013)

Websites: http://eastlondonhistory.com/2011/06/16/petticoat-lane-or-middlesex-street/

     http://www.whitechapelsociety.com/markets/