Nine Elms Sunday Market and the new London of money
Traders are threatened by redevelopment and gentrification
It being a rare sunny morning, I took a stroll through Vauxhall, the area of south London where I’ve lived for the past eight years, and down to the Thames. I wanted to see the sculptures of horses that have been placed on the riverbank below the MI6 building, whose purpose is to make us think about climate change.
The gentrification of Vauxhall
I’d normally turn right here and head east, towards the centre of town, Waterloo and the South Bank, Tate Modern, the Royal Festival Hall, the Millennium Bridge. But today I went west, under Vauxhall Bridge, along the Thames Path that passes in front of the St George’s Wharf development, an ugly mess of green glass, concrete and pagoda roofs that even the developer refuses to defend (it was forced through by the great aesthete John Prescott against the wishes of local people and the advice of experts). Ugly as it is, a flat here could cost you £5 million; yet the development feels semi-inhabited at best. Perhaps the owners head to the country at weekends or maybe, as some claim, the flats were bought as investments by people in China and Malaysia, who never intended to live in them.
The redevelopment of Battersea Power Station
Still, it’s a nice walk on a summer’s day and affords a view of Battersea Power station which, after decades of dereliction, is being redeveloped as expensive flats with every ostentatious trapping of luxury. A studio flat here sold for £1 million off plan last year and came back on the market for £1.5 million six months later — even though it had still not been built. Welcome to the new London of money, where everything is a negotiated instrument.
Before long the Thames Path peters out and leads you across a busy five-lane carriageway, and into the area known as Nine Elms. When I moved to Vauxhall, this was a long stretch of semi-derelict industrial land, largely occupied by the depots of delivery firms like DHL and Yodel. Eventually, though, developers realised that if you flipped the new London of money on its axis, Nine Elms would be Chelsea and they began to build: more luxury flats, inevitably, thousands of them. The area is plastered with billboards showing Manhattanesque views of London, taken from the lofty Master of the Universe perspective that those who part with the necessary millions will occupy, in their apartments ‘serviced by a five-star world-class hotel’.
At the heart of the new Nine Elms is the new American Embassy, an imposing half-finished glass cube, which opens for business in 2017. A ‘linear park’ will link it to Vauxhall itself. Twenty thousand new homes; twenty-five thousand new jobs; the CGI visualisations look spectacular and lovely.
At the heart of the old Nine Elms, meanwhile, is the fruit, veg and flower market to which the traders of Covent Garden were decanted in 1974, to allow Covent Garden itself to be redeveloped as a shopping centre. It’s a forbiddingly functional wholesale market with rows of concrete sheds in the centre of a vast car and lorry park. If you get up early, you can, I’m told, get great bargains on plants and flowers but it’s not really intended for the public.
Food stalls at Nine Elms Sunday Market
At weekends, though, it becomes the home of the Nine Elms Sunday market, a vast and sprawling affair of some 400 stalls. This attracts thousands of people: you can see them all day long, snaking through the streets and car parks. But it is no Spitalfields or Broadway market; you will look in vain for meticulously curated collections of vintage clothes, well chosen antiques or organic food. Here you will find cheap cleaning materials, pirated CDs and DVDs, low-cost luggage, plastic shoes with velcro fastenings, gaudy household ornaments, secondhand laptops, jackets, T-shirts and sweat pants in shiny man-made fibres that seem ready to explode into flames, second hand power tools, piles of secondhand trainers and sports shoes, hats, caps, knock-off perfumes, Chinese herbal medicines made to look like Viagra. Nothing here is artisan.
There are food stalls, too. From a wall of rotisseries built into the side of a van you can buy roast chicken or an enormous rack of ribs, a smoky Polish grill serves skewers of peppers and huge chunks of roast meat. There are delicious smelling Persian kebabs, Brazilian churros, stalls selling Thai, Chinese and Indian, as well as burger bars and hot-dog stands. I sat at a table at the back of a Colombian pinchos stall and enjoyed a plate of chicken, sausage, salad, plantain, potato and crisp corn cakes, while the radio played loud Latin dance music and everybody around me spoke Spanish.
The Sunday market is noisy and chaotic, some of the stalls are slightly dodgy but it has the authentic energy of low-level capitalism, fuelled by people who want to make money and get on. From somewhere in these stalls will doubtless emerge the next Alan Sugar or Marks & Spencer. I guess migrants, newly arrived in London, come here to hear their languages spoken, eat their food, meet their compatriots, get work, buy the tools of their trade, set up their businesses.
The gentrification of Nine Elms
The thousands who throng here have little in common with those who spend their Sundays at Spitalfields or your local farmers’ market: they’re Eastern European, Latin American, African, Middle Eastern, British working class, white, black and brown, people who get pushed to the margins. They are the people who clean the offices and serviced flats, drive the mini-cabs, work the late shifts at the open-all-hours supermarkets: in the new London of money, they’re not expected to take centre stage. These are not the people you see on developers’ CGI visualisations.
In London, we often compare ourselves favourably with Paris, where the poor have remorselessly been forced to the outskirts. It is possible to view the Nine Elms Sunday market as a kind of assertion that there is a place in the heart of London for the poor, for migrants, for the working classes, for people on benefits, somewhere they can be the noisy, confident majority.
But for how much longer, I wonder. The Nine Elms market is being redeveloped: the fruit, veg and flowers traders will remain, housed in new buildings, which will be opened up to the public, with shops, cafes and restaurants. It sounds lovely and I’m sure I will go there a lot.
But what, I wonder, will happen to the Sunday market? Will it be allowed to remain, in the shadow of the US Embassy and the multi-million-pound flats? Or will it turn out that the purveyors of cheap luggage, secondhand tools and Chinese Viagra are at odds with the corporate vision for the new, monied Nine Elms?
If that turns out to be the case, I’m certain that the vibrant forces of capitalism that power the Sunday market will ensure that it reconstitutes itself somewhere else. But that will doubtless be at some discreet distance from the centre of town where it will cause no embarrassment to the residents of the new London of money.
