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Spitalfields Market: A Living Installation
Why the artsy and chaotic market is good for the grey-suited City of London...
She must have been in her late twenties, her hair as short and thick and black as the bristles on a broom, her green eyes weary and inquisitive, but I only glimpsed her face briefly before she crouched forward and buried her face in her arms, resting on the table. Her clutch of male friends sat erect and silent, sipping beer, smiling sardonically and talking little; their hands were sooty, their faces lined and weather-beaten. None were over forty. When she peed, her urine filled the slight bowl of the chair and quickly spilled over, sputtering on the ground where it meandered to form a snaking pool. For a while she sat in her urine.
A young man positioned himself on the adjacent table. He projected a large, goofy and eager face. He gulped some beer and sighed, and gazed around like someone who had been walking in the desert and had chanced on a little settlement.
`What's wrong with her?' he asked no one in particular. `Is she drunk or something?'
The men looked at him for a moment and then they smirked conspiratorially, but they did not shake their heads or answer back. The smirk remained plastered on their lips.
Everyone else at the terrace of the pub seemed unfazed: the junkies are hardly an unusual sight in Spitalfields Market, with its artsy, chaotic market hall crowded with stalls hawking New Age offerings for irreverent but discerning visitors. It's the place where you can treat yourself to some organic delicacies and equally the place where you can hang out and have a cheap meal. It's been in its present incarnation since 1993 and has since become a throbbing tourist attraction - each stall is like an installation in a spontaneous public art place and it has the bonus of historical notoriety. Here, in the heart of London's East End, waves of immigrants built rickety lives. In the seventeenth century, French Huguenots found refuge when they fled religious persecution; then came the Irish and later the Jews; now it's home to the Bengalis who arrived in the 1960s and 1970s, and mark one of the frontiers of ethnic assimilation and racism in London. The market was erected in 1893 as a wholesale fruit and vegetable market serving the impoverished and downtrodden immigrants.
There is something ironic about a makeshift working class market being requisitioned into a New Age carnival by cultured, middle-class young people pursuing an alternative, holistic lifestyle. But these are the new cultural outcasts. These artsy dropouts are at the socially-conscious frontline, like the immigrants that preceded them, because the Corporation of London, the elite body that runs the City, London's financial quarter, wants more economical uses for this space - an office tower block for example, in short supply at the City. SMUT (Spitalfields Market Under Threat), a coalition of individuals and local civic do-gooders, have been battling the Corporation of London's plans.
Perhaps half the size of a football ground, the market is girdled with red-bricked storehouses and its hall is covered with a green-framed pitched roof of glass. Cheap, unassuming and comfortable clothes take up most stalls, and there is also stalls of home d‚cor and bric-a-brac - candle and candle-holders, pastel lampshades, small trunks and jewellery boxes, cut-outs of mirrors - and a section dedicated to fresh organic produce and flower arrangements. Some do tarot card readings for a small fee, buskers fill the air with a variety of musical instruments, food kiosks dish out quick meals ranging from Mexican to Indian cuisine, and there is enough masseurs to set up a School of Massage Therapy. For œ5 you could treat yourself to a fifteen-minute back massage, and for œ7 you can try `Head Ecstasy' - a multi-fingered brass clamp that, when moved over the head in slow circles, sends shivers of tingles down your neck and back.
`Oh, it's great,' my friend raved. `You should try it.'
But I preferred to sit in the beer garden with a drink instead of shadowing the other five hundred visitors, half of them tourists and half Londoners, mostly young, as they loitered and gawked.
SMUT has mustered wide support for their campaign. In several visible protests, a few dozen participants held vigils of silence outside the elite financial office blocks. They brandished banners screaming `Save this Public Space.' They wore white masks to symbolise the bland uniformity of corporate hegemony - the smothering of people's cultural and artistic expression, the monoculture of glass office blocks over the diversity of the alternative uses. Already, the office block rising next door to the market will annihilate the market by its monumental dominion and claustrophobic shadow. Yet the Corporation of London has also partly yielded to pressure and common sense - after all, this is a popular tourist attraction. Large signs proclaim, `Welcome to the Saved Spitalfields Market.' SMUT argues that the market is not `saved' because the Corporation of London has upgrading plans.
According to those plans, the market would be renovated and part of it re-assigned for `high class retail' while the stalls would be fixed, organised, and tendered to privileged, chosen companies. In other words, they would clean up the area, squeeze out the junkies and dropouts making a meagre living, and present a high-class tourist attraction. It's about regulation and milking the maximum amount of money from every square foot. And there is nothing wrong with that policy, as such, but when you peer through the market's doorway towards the high-rise office blocks you might change your mind: they are sleek, grey, modern, dramatic and triumphal, but they are larger than life, elite, and inaccessible.
Unlike an office block, you can't simply graft an artistic public space. Spitalfields Market is vibrant because there is little overbearing regulation to hamper it; it is organic, spontaneous, ever evolving. It's the antithesis of the City's grey solemnity: a welcome enclave in the heart of the City that the Corporation of London should exploit to its advantage. That might include inviting the artisans and outside entrepreneurs to spill into the City's streets: the office workers are only likely to benefit from a little colour and carnival, living installations outside their windows, a creative splash in an otherwise drab and sterile grid of streets. It makes good business sense.
(c) Victor Paul Borg
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