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Can we save Queen’s Market from yet another superstore?

by Louise Ford

photos by Carly Crittenden

The multicultural bustling bazaar that is Queen’s Market in Upton Park is under threat from redevelopment plans. Louise Ford talks to the campaigners who are trying to save it.

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The redevelopment plans for Queen’s Market were unveiled in November 2004 by Newham council – and from the outset, shoppers and traders had concerns over the plans to regenerate the site.

Located on Green Street in Upton Park, Newham, Queen’s Market is a bustling bazaar full of fruit, vegetables and assorted cloths and beads for making garments.

It is open on Tuesdays, Thursday, Fridays and Saturdays, and is popular both with residents and visitors to east London. It has both an olde-world feel to it, and also represents something of the cultural dynamism of the new East London.

Now, the market is threatened by plans to develop a new Asda supermarket, raising concerns that this historic site, which continues to bring together the communities of Upton Park, will be much reduced – in both size and character.

The campaign group Friends of Queen’s Market – a cohort of traders, consumers and residents – was set up to challenge the way the council has handled the remaking of the market.

Claire Peasnell, a campaigner and regular shopper at Queen’s Market, explains: ‘People in the borough heard about the market closing. Traders and shoppers use the market as a place of social interchange.

‘They love it, they use it – and they think there is a real need for it to exist. They know it brings tourists, visitors and shoppers from outside of the borough.’

Queen’s Market has been up and running for 100 years. It is alive with street entertainment, history and memories.

Friends of Queen’s Market are worried that the market will be less successful after the redevelopment. If the supermarket plans go ahead, the amount of space for market stalls would fall from 10,394 square metres to 2,570 square metres. The number of market stalls would fall from 60 to 11.

Friends of Queen’s Market are opposed to these drastic reductions in market space. They have their own plans for refurbishing the market, while still keeping it as a place for social interchange.

‘We would like the market to be looked at from a twenty-first century point of view’, says Claire Peasnell. ‘We would like the area to be kept so clean that it can become a flagship for Newham.’

And she argues that local shoppers are more likely to look after and keep clean a market area – which they feel they have some ownership over – than the streets surrounding a corporate-owned and atomising supermarket.

Peasnell says they also want to update the way in which the market is managed.

‘We want modern management put in place, which would not be by the council alone. Instead, management would involve representatives from traders, shoppers and residents. So it would be a cooperative.’

One of the great strengths and beauties of this working-class market is the range of cuisine and clothing that it sells, catering to the needs of local multicultural shoppers far better than a supermarket ever could.

Friends of Queen’s Market want to assist the local community to take ownership of this space, rather than hand it over to yet another supermarket development.

Louise Ford is a second-year Media Studies student at the University of East London.

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