Daily MPfree: Teeth

Teeth have been making a noise on the LDN gig circuit for a while now, always playing shows around Hoxton’s hot spots and being excitable and colourful all over the internet. Turning to esteemed remixer DREAMTRAK is a smart move – he has previously turned songs by Gaggle, Foals, Internet Forever, and more recently Mat Riviere and Pagan Wanderer Lu into exciting 80’s pop numbers or elongated techno anthems. His refined sensibility is put to great use here, slowly building the intensity into a euphoric blowout that sounds something like The Knife turned up to eleven.

Teeth – See Spaces (DREAMTRAK DIAMOND SOUND) by snipelondon

Snipe Likes: Final Fantasy / Owen Pallett

Final Fantasy, currently working under his given name Owen Pallett after becoming successful enough to pop up on Squaresoft’s radar in Japan, is nothing if not prolific.

This post brings together a couple of treasures that had a limited release. The internet has kind of killed off the notion of rarities, but these tracks should be in the collection of any Final Fantasy fan…

“The Butcher” was released between albums as part of the “Spectrum, 14th Century” EP. It’s a prime example of Pallett’s deft arrangements, lyrical imagination and compellingly plaintive delivery, beginning “Doomsday, the end of a century, in accord with prophecy…”

“Spell For a Weak Heart” came as part of the “Young Canadian Mothers” EP. I still find myself humming it and straining to remember where the song is from on a regular basis, a couple of years later…

Pallett’s newest album “Heartland” is a slow-burning masterpiece; the violinist who was introduced to the UK as a support act and strings player in The Arcade Fire has since eclipsed them with his consistently high-calibre output.

Including his (in)famous Mariah Carey cover…

Final Fantasy – The Butcher by snipelondon

Final Fantasy – Spell for a Weak Heart by snipelondon

Lewis Takes Off His Shirt from Owen Pallett on Vimeo.

Daily MPfree: Thesaurus Club

Thesaurus Club is made up of Amelia and Stef (two thirds of DIY girl group Pens) and a chap called Dan. This is a pretty, simple drone track made of of a few loops, lyrics and some “heys”, of which the final one is the best.

Thesaurus Club – All the Things I Do Wrong by snipelondon

Stairway to Bletherin'

Alan Hindle illustration

In Stairway to Heaven, Makthon is the new boy, doing construction on the pyramid of Cheops 4,700 years ago, being shown the ropes by co-workers Hiksos and Geb. A recent onsite fatality has everybody edgy, and Makthon’s lucky escape from a tumbling ten-ton lump of masonry is tied to his Amun Ra protection amulet. Gradually, under the crushing sun and workload, the boy ferments into religious fervour, is visited at night by ghosts and gods and believes himself fatefully bound to the Pharoah. Meanwhile, all his drunken workmates want is to do is get into his loincloth. As the pyramid nears completion, and Makthon ascends to the depths of madness, the question becomes an obsession- What is the secret of the pyramid? What will happen when the final capstone is in place?

If you piled up all the statistics, crazy theories, historical baggage and archaeological adventurism surrounding the pyramids of Egypt you’d have another, with enough crap left over to knock out a few Sphinxes in the garden like decorative gnomes.

So what were the pyramids really about? You won’t find out from Stairway to Heaven, produced by Fallen Angel Theatre Company.

Here, men shout to express something, because volume equals emotion, and poetry is nothing deeper than noticing stars in the sky. Matthew Ward as Geb attempts awkwardly to provide his character some depth as the doomed older worker who falls in love with Makthon, and at least he tries, but otherwise homosexuality appears to be some sort of indicator of the harshness of life. You go to work and if everybody isn’t stealing olives from your lunch they’re trying to rape you. Perhaps this was true. The boundaries of “sexuality” were more vague back then. Maybe playwright Steve Hennessey’s research found that 3500 years ago construction work was synonymous with gay rape. Or perhaps Hennessey really wanted to write a prison drama and hit upon the pyramids as a way to add a little mystique. But when the gritty climax arrives it’s mediocre, passionless, perfunctory, and badly lit. A half-assed attempt at transgression and a trite use of history.

And what is the secret of the pyramid? I won’t—can’t—spoil it any more than the show does, but I’m certain the architects had something weightier in mind than a philosophy printable on a T-shirt of Egyptian cotton.

Stairway to Heaven plays at the Blue Elephant Theatre, 59a. Bethwin Road, blueelephanttheatre.co.uk until July 10.

In a desert on the other side of the globe, in an altogether more humble structure, lives Monk O’Neil, lover, poet, philospher and grower of tomatoes. One day, X years ago, a mototcyclist on a Harley Davidson crashed outside O’Neil’s ramshackle shack. and, following a brief snack and swig of wine, died. Mort Lazarus is still buried in the backyard (the backyard being the entirety of the Australian outback) under a tree trunk, with only an alarm clock and a metronome to mark his grave. O’Neill, meantime, marks his own passing of time by the steady decay of his body. Like a reverse water clock he keeps track of the years by counting the decreasing dribbles and drops of piss he can pass. Every day is much like another while he recalls all the people he’s mistreated over his lifetime now steadily dying of old age.

Monk seems unable to die. Perhaps Mort was the Grim Reaper, killed by the fierce Australian terrain, and now Monk is as immortal as his character, but his body keeps on rotting just the same.

Mark Little, 20 years on since the fame he attained on the Aussie soap neighbours, looks every inch a crotchedy, out-of-shape old bastard. He totally inhabits a difficult character and the nearly overwhelming script of A Stretch of the Imagination. A dictionary of down-under lingo is provided, and for the first quarter of the show I spent more time rifling that than watching the play. Jack Hibberd, who wrote the show nearly forty years ago, wears his influences proudly. Stretch is very much an antipodean take on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, with large doses of James Joyce’s Ulysses. While Beckett is funnier, and Joyce richer, Hibberd’s masterstroke is to realise that Australian colloquialisms are vast and varied enough to construct an entire language from them. Also, while the language is thicker than a blackberry bramble over a hobo’s grave, the theme is as simple as Godot: Death is thankfully inevitable. For Monk, however, death is dead and he’s stuck living with himself and his ghosts.

Little, who also designed and directed the show, seems as large a personality as Monk, and he spews out what could easily be gibberish with casual aplomb. Well, much of it, to non-Aussie ears, is gibberish, but that’s half the fun of Ulysses, too. Letting words flow over you and enjoying the music of nonsense. Which is perhaps what life is about, anyway.

A fun show, and Little is a joy to watch rot.

A Stretch of the Imagination runs at the Cock Tavern, 125 Kilburn High Road, cocktaverntheatre.com until July 17.

People come and go, taking their stories with them. They live, love, shout, interact, then melt away into the darkness. Strangers occasionally join them to watch their arguments and dilemmas.You can pop in, too, to eavesdrop up close and be shouted at. It’s like being back home again!

In the V&A’s Porter gallery sit two of the six specially commissioned structures from the 1:1 Architects Build Small Spaces exhibition. One is a beautiful trapazoid of simple wood designed to be a slightly improbable toolshed. The other is a slim tower, four stories high, a spiral made up of tiny rooms swathed in thick, almost suffocating red velvet curtains, designed and created by Jose Carlos Teixeira.. The Factory, also currently finishing their Spoonfed Round 2 series of productions, have been inhabiting the tower recently to tell three very short tales.

Truth to tell, it was a bit hard figuring out what the plays were about. The first seemed to be about a man plagued by friendly spirits called Smurz who’s brought a woman home to meet them. The second was about a community of inept fire marshals trying desperately to contain a fire in their building without having a single clue what fire is. The third was about a young couple with a filthy toilet expecting an important sports figure dropping by for an official visit.

The show is free and the performances are fun. The middle bit about the fire was an unexpectedly brilliant piece of absurdity, with the actors shouting out new and exciting ways to put out fire, such as starting new fires to take the pressure off the main one, or having everybody hold their breath to create a vacuum and thus deprive the flames of oxygen. The best part, besides being free, is that you can wander into the tower while the performance is going on and observe from within! A hoot. Afterwards you can continue wandering the V&A, ogling the beauty of history and pondering the rudeness of the staff. Obviously not all the staff are rude. Probably only a few. Try to meet the same ones I did to get the full snarly experience.

The Factory’s performances are now done, but The Lab Theatre Collective will be doing their response to the Teixeira Tower July 2-4, the seven sisters group will be performing A Hairy Tale from July 9-11, the Jeremis Irons Arts Collective will be doing re/cycled between July 16 and 18 and Les Enfants Terrible finish the “season” with a whodunit called The Vaudevillians: The Half Hour Calls from July 24-25.

The Factory’s shows were at 1 and 3pm, but check the companies’s respective websites to make sure. Jazz performances also take place every Friday night at 8 until July 25 at the Woodshed mentioned above.

Mayor Livingstone, you presume?

Could Ken Livingstone or “Comeback Ken” as the Evening Standard have dubbed him surprise us all by returning to City Hall?

At first glance it seems unlikely. Politicians rarely return to the seats they have lost and almost never in order to replace the people who have succeeded them.
And yet Ken has made a career out of confounding expectations, most famously when he took on the best efforts of Tony Blair in order to become London’t first Mayor in 2000.

Like then, Ken still faces fierce opposition from big names on the right wing of the Labour party and like then they still seem incapable of beating him.

But unlike then Ken faces an incumbent Mayor who is well known and enjoys a dogged loyalty from his supporters. So while Ken looks more likely to win the Labour nomination than Oona King, his chances of beating Boris appear far more distant.

However, for all his charm, there are signs that Boris is far more vulnerable than is commonly believed.

There has been very little polling since 2008 but the recent Annual London Survey shows that many Londoners are deeply non-plussed by Boris’s performance as Mayor.

Asked how he was doing in the job, just 26% said they were satisfied with him, down from 44% for Ken three years ago. More telling was the huge amount of people who have little or no opinion of Boris’s performance at all, up to 63%.

So while Boris is clearly a less divisive figure than his predecessor, he is also making far less of an impact on Londoners. And with the government cuts set to hit London hard in 2012, Londoners may well decide it is in their interests to turn to Ken.

The current Mayor’s performance aside, another factor that could stop Ken is the choices made by the smaller parties.

At the last election the Lib Dems feel that they underperformed and are now holding out to see who Labour selects before choosing their candidate.

However, I’m told that both the Lib Dems and the Greens are unlikely to go for the kind of celebrity candidate that could take a big chunk out of Ken or Boris’s vote.

London Lib Dems tell me that they are looking for somebody who would improve the showing of their Assembly candidates rather than concentrating on gaining the Mayoralty itself.

“We’re not going to win it realistically” one source told me candidly, “but we do need somebody who can go up against Jeremy Paxman.”

The Greens too are looking for a solid performer who will raise the party’s profile rather than their own. “We don’t want the tail to wag the dog” one said.

On individual names I’m told that former Green Mayoral candidate Sian Berry is not in the frame this time and reports that Lembit Öpik would run were described to me as “total bollocks.”

Yet the deciding factor for the main parties may well be time. By 2012 Ken will be approaching 70 and may struggle to find the energy needed to take back City Hall.
But for Boris too the clock is ticking. And as each month goes by, Londoners will increasingly ask just what if anything he has done for them.

In the next two years Boris will have all the advantages of incumbency to secure re-election, and it would be a fool who underestimated his political skill.

But in opposition Ken also has many advantages, and it’s how he uses them which will ultimately decide whether he has one last comeback in him after all these years.

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Diving for dollars: Where there is Bill Clegg’s muck, there’s brass

For a glimpse at the eye-watering hypocrisy inherent in British culture pick up a newspaper and flip to the book reviews. Headline stories can, and sometimes do, pay lip service to allegedly shared values like fairness, equal opportunity, progressive politics, etc but the truth leaks out where you least expect it.

Case in point: the fawning coverage of Bill Clegg’s ‘Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man’. The Guardian ran a 3200-word excerpt from the book (5 June) alongside a hagiographic portrait of the blond, square-jawed author gazing pensively into the middle distance. Eager readers can order their very own copy from the Guardian bookshop at a discounted price of £11.99. Independent reviewer Julian Hall writes: “you’d be hard pressed not to be captivated” (20 June) and calls the book “addictive and masterful”.

What is the substance of this literary masterpiece? High-living New York literary agent Clegg (“[My boyfriend] Noah and I have moved into a beautiful apartment that Noah’s grandmother paid cash for, and we’ve filled it with vintage photographs and furniture and expensive Persian rugs”) gets addicted to crack, runs his agency into the ground, goes to rehab, and – yay! – he’s better now. The sheer, forehead-slapping stupidity of it boggles the mind. ‘Portrait’ is not the soul-searching of a man who genuinely plumbed the depths. “We’re turning a profit,” he writes, recalling business during the heyday of his rock habit. “A number of books that I am selling are reviewed well everywhere. There will be one, a cherished one, that becomes a finalist for the National Book Award.” Along with hitting the pipe, he hits shops for $3,000 Gucci suits, flies to Sundance to the premier of his boyfriend’s film, and goes to the cash machine every night “taking out batches of $200” to pay for his drugs.
“From a distance,” he chirps, “it looks like an enviable life.” Correction, you self-
absorbed prat: it is an enviable life.

What’s more, it’s a life Clegg is able to parlay into celebrity for the simple, sickening reason that he is white and wealthy. Imagine if the face in the author photo was black. Holy moral panic Batman! The scribes and Pharisees would swarm like locusts, howling to the heavens about the irresponsibility of ‘glamourising drug use’.

Editorials would question the ethics of rewarding Clegg’s crack habit with a reported $350,000 advance (New York Observer, 8 Sept 2008). The Daily Mail would run a series of lurid articles about crack babies, illustrated with grainy, irrelevant photos of people shooting up in stairwells.

I don’t blame Clegg for being an opportunist. If someone offered me a few hundred thousand dollars to write about the idiot things I’ve done, I’d take the money and run. What I can’t get past is that we live in a media culture where someone did offer him that money. It would be nice if there were at least a moral to the story but Clegg seems strangely unreconstructed, untouched by it all:
There is a time, much later, when I will imagine what it was like for everyone else: the employees at the agency who lost their jobs; the writers I represented who depended on me… family; friends; Kate. Noah. At first, I’m consumed with shame and guilt and regret, but slowly, and with help, these feelings evolve into something less self-concerned.

“At first”, he’s consumed with shame and guilt but “these feelings evolve”? Into what, pray tell? Into thinking: actually, it’s totally okay to screw over everyone in my life?

Clegg writes: “After I collapse and am taken to hospital, after a spell in a psychiatric ward and a successful period in rehab… I will be offered a job at another literary agency.” Because hey, as long as you’re white and middle-class being a crack addict isn’t bad. It’s a career move.

cilwarncke.wordpress.com

Random Interview: Dom: Lover of cheese and Cheese Stall Owner, Borough Market

Wandering through Borough Market in the late evening June sun is a warming experience. In the soft summer light office workers, with ties askew, unwind outside the pubs with pints in hand. The smell of cooking sausages drifts through the air, trains rumble overhead and the atmosphere is buzzing with post-work cheeriness. In all the bustling I met a man who has managed to turn his enthusiasm for cheese into a successful entrepreneurial adventure.

SNIPE: How did you discover your enthusiasm for cheese?

Dom: Well my earliest memories are of cheese. There was an old couple I used to visit. We would go round to their house for cheese and crackers. I still remember the flavours vividly, after that taste I continued to yearn for cheese. I also grew up on a farm and remember the churns of milk that were brought up from the cows.

S: How did you break into the cheese industry?

D: I came to London and saw an advert in the Ham and High that said “Do You Like Cheese?” and something twigged and so I responded and ended up working at Neals Yard Dairy serving cheese over the counter. I remember coming in on my first day and being hit with this over-powering repugnant smell and thinking—I don’t know if I can stand this, but it tasted delicious. Nine years later and I am still doing it.

S: How did you end up breaking out and selling cheese yourself?

D: It was never really the plan, I did a Master’s in philosophy but a friend had an idea of going to France and selecting a cheese to sell. He had the cash and I had the time. We only serve one cheese called Comté. We take a trip there every so often for five weeks. We try the cheese and try to enjoy all the local flavours the local area has to offer.

S: It must be a bit of an adventure. Any tales from your trips?

D: Well, now we go so often that we are quite efficient now. We fly into Geneva and hire a car. I do remember a time I was bought a drink in a bar. I thought it was a bit cloudy looking, and I found out after I drank it that the bottle had a huge black dead snake inside that had been drowned in there in the 1940s.

S: Were you annoyed about not being told about the snake?

D: No I was just in shock, trying to analyse how I felt.

S: Does cheese really give you nightmares or is it just a myth?

*D: Well if you take the Freudian approach, dreams are the guardians of sleep and if we have bodily disturbances our imagination creates a story around that feeling, but with good quality cheese you don’t get that indigestion or bodily upset.

S: What are the physical effects of eating too much cheese?

D: It has made me happier.

S: What do you like about working here in the market?

D: The freedom, there’s always a buzz here, but in some ways it has changed. There are more people coming through but less being bought. Borough Market has become very sucessful and in some ways success feeds itself. The products start being packaged in smaller sizes and the innovation gets a bit lost. In many ways it’s like a person. Initially at the beginning, people have boundless energy and then as you get to middle age, the energy and ideas become more managed and you become complacent, then you start to go a bit senile.

S: But surely the life of the market can go around in a circle and start getting back to the initial innovation?

D: Yeah, I still think there’s lots of life left in it, the raw ingredients are still in place, no pun intended, and there are still innovative traders here, like the guy who sells sausages.

S: Is it fair to say that cheese is your passion or has dictated the course of your life?

D: it is fundamental to my life. I get a bit disturbed if I know there isn’t any cheese in the house. I hesitate to use the word passion. It is a trite adjective that says nothing. People applying for jobs say “I have a passion..” but this is more like a love affair. There is so much more emotion going on in a love affair than just passion. I can’t imagine a a life without it. It is a temporamental thing, sometimes good, boring or interesting but it has a social aspect and that is vital.

S: Do you think we are losing touch with these social tools, like the importance of certain foods that help bring us together in a communal way?

D: Definitely… mass production is reducing products to numbers and quantities. We are not experiencing them. Cheese is a vital ingredient. It’s in so many things and is part of our everyday lives. It can invigorate our palates but also add to the enjoyment of life. So much of life can pass by without any peaks, and for me cheese is one of the peaks.

S: Do other people in your life love cheese as much as you?

D: Not as avidly, well except those who work in cheese. My young son doesn’t like cheese at all. If I give him a bit of cheese he just laughs. I am not sure why.

Visit Dom at his stall— The Borough Market Cheese Company, Borough Market, Southwark Street and try some cheese

Going on and on and on and on …: After Human Centipede, where can humanity drop next?

As you read these words, somewhere in the lovely summer light of this great and cultured city, one actress is miming having her lips sewn to the anus of another. As civic honours go, London is cleaning up. First we win the right to host the Olympics, and now we win the right, no, the honour, of hosting the filming of Human Centipede II, which started this month.

For those of you who have spent the last few months on planet decency, Human Centipede I was a film about a surgeon who creates a monster by sewing three people together in the manner described above.

How to top that in the sequel? The makers are understandably keeping tight lipped. One can only hope that once the cameras start rolling, the actors manage to do the same.

Rumour has it that rather than the three components of the original, the Human Centipede II will consist of twelve people joined together ass to mouth to form a perfect circle. I think the technical literary term for this is ring composition.

It’s pretty sick, for sure. But for all the comment the film has attracted (this column included), I can’t shake off a sort of shrugging feeling as I read the plot synopsis. Ass, mouth, shit: it might disgust, but does it really surprise? Generation X might have been shocked by this sort of thing. but we’re Generation Meh, haven’t we seen it all before?

Which asks the question, where are the next generation of artists going to turn for controversy? Oh there’s bestiality of course, or trusty old paedophilia. And I guess you could say no one has yet written the scatological incest novel, although Ian McEwan will probably get round to it sooner or later.

But these things are already available on the internet, right now, on Redtube, Youporn, Xvideos, Dudetube. And it spills over into real life. Time was when there was a ripple of excitement over whether you’d get a kiss on the fifth date without a chaperone. Now if you don’t fuck on the third, you can find yourself in court over breach of contract, and unless you’re a black belt in dildo you can’t help but find your performance inferior to the stuff you’ve seen online.

And then comes Chatroulette, an idea so theoretically pure and wholesome you could sell it in Waitrose. Here is an opportunity to communicate directly with anyone in the world. Imagine, to choose two nationalities completely at random, an Israeli child and a Palestinian, divided by their religions, their ideologies and their people. One day they chance upon each other in this great meeting place of the world and they talk, as children do, and their talk is unmediated by rancour, censorship or propaganda. They discover that for all that divides them, what unites them is so much more, and a beautiful friendship blooms. Chatroulette teaches them what their parents never could (and I’m copyrighting this slogan for when the film comes out): “you can’t put a blockade on love.”

And now think to what use Chatroulette is actually put: wanking. Why? Because there are no repercussions, and this means there are no rules.

In Freudian terms (yeah, snipe can do deep), Chatroulette is the unfettering of the id, the removal of the civilising force, the return to the wild. It’s also a parade of men wanking over each other in the desperate hope of stumbling across a woman, but that doesn’t sound nearly so impressive.

Think about it: humans disappearing into a darkened space, crouched alone round a small spot of light and heat, thinking only of sex, food and bodily functions. It’s like we’ve gone back to living in caves, only now they have wifi.

So stop using it people! Re-fetter your id! It’s stupid, it’s inane, it’s as unshocking and as vacuous as the Human Centipede. It’s also profoundly boring. And as all Generation Meh-ers know, there’s nothing worse than that.

NME Radio gets the axe, 6 Music may be the beneficiary

Unless you’ve been living in a cave—or listening to Heart FM—for the past six months, you’ll have heard the anger which greeted the BBC’s plans to axe 6 Music, its digital radio station dedicated to alternative music.

What BBC radio boss—and its one-time marketing chief—Tim Davie didn’t expect was to see 6 Music’s audience soar as a result of the row, which had given the station a publicity boost of the kind that his PR campaigns for the station had never quite achieved.

But another champion of new bands has already slipped off the air. On 12 June, NME Radio quietly sank under the radio waves—its DJs thrown overboard and an automated service put in its place. Funnily enough, that automated service is better than most other things on DAB radio right now —if it’s still on air by the time you read this.

NME Radio was a simple, uncomplicated, indie rock station. The NME name may have deterred some listeners at first, but it came as a pleasant surprise, there whenever 6 Music got a bit too talkative or pseudy.

But the sums didn’t add up, with DX Media—the firm producing the station under licence from publishers IPC—suddenly ending its contract.

IPC was serious about NME Radio tearing up trees. For its launch in June 2008, it provided studios inside its Southwark HQ, while NME editor Krissi Murison recently declared the station was ready to “fill the gap” if the BBC axed 6 Music.

But NME Radio attracted little of the advertising it needed to survive. An unintentionally hilarious trailer for the Metal Hammer Meltdown rock show “with Gill and Bees!” (or was it “killer bees?”)—cue drum and vocal racket—seemed to fill every other ad break.

Who was listening? In October 2008, after its launch, it was clocking up 215,000 listeners each week via satellite/cable TV and online. Respectable for a station which had been given very little promotion beyond NME’s magazine and website.

However, by May 2010, with the station on DAB across the UK, it had reached 226,000 listeners. It appeared the station had spent 18 months just treading water.

The station’s launch on DAB was also overshadowed by the furore over 6 Music’s planned closure—which delivered hundreds of thousands of new listeners to the BBC station. Its audience is now over a million.

BBC management claim 6 Music’s output is “commercially valuable” but the woes of NME Radio, and others before it, suggest otherwise.

Xfm’s original incarnation crashed and burned less than a year after its launch in 1997, while an attempt in 2008 to give Q Radio a high-profile relaunch also foundered after just a few months. That station has also now vanished from DAB sets.

Advertisers just aren’t interested in authentic-sounding indie music radio in sufficient numbers to cover the bills—especially when that cash is needed to pay for expensive platforms like DAB.

As for the future, you’ll still find a DJ-free, ad-free version of NME Radio on the magazine’s website, while leading DJ Jon Hillcock has signalled he’ll continue his New Noise show as a podcast.

Now all ears are listening for what noises come out of the BBC Trust, which is deciding if it should approve 6 Music’s closure. NME Radio’s loss will be keenly felt by many—but the trust’s members will surely have seen that alternative music radio simply can’t survive in the commercial sector. 

Maybe, just maybe, the loss of NME Radio may save 6 Music.

853blog.wordpress.com

Market Crash: London’s historic markets under threat

Street markets have been an integral part of London’s history, shaping the communities and local economies around them. Some of the city’s markets have been trading for centuries, and even from Roman times, but now many of the traditional ones are in decline or in serious threat of disappearing altogether.

There are many factors that have contributed to the instability of London’s street trade. Rises in rent and rates, the recession and competition from supermarkets have all contributed to the deterioration of the capital’s established market places.
And how can conventional markets compare? Since the recession people are unwilling to spend their spare cash on what has recently become a luxury item, clothing. Richard Miller has worked on his clothes stall for 27 years; but he can no longer afford to employ another member of staff and lately describes breaking even as a good day:

“I used to be able to work for an hour and make a profit, but this year I haven’t broken even once and without fail the council have put up the rent.”

This is a similar story with most traders, in economic hardship, people are assessing their basic needs and clothes, by tradition a necessity, have become a luxury good that many people would rather not buy from the market.
Many stalls in the markets simply cannot compete with the throw away culture, symbolised by stores such as Primark, where shoppers can buy a complete outfit for under £8.

Rates set by local councils and management associations have inflicted a fair amount of damage to the average trader. Shepherds Bush Market, which is managed by TFL, have increased their management rates by an average of 27 per cent during 2008-2009. They also charge traders interest on late payments, which has priced many traders out of business.

But even local councils are feeling the effect of the decline, with a significant loss to their income. Revenue from Camden Market, for example, fell from £30.7 million in December 2009 to £3.15 million in March 2010.

Traders are not the only casualty of the potentially dangerous decline in business for street markets; charitable shops are also feeling the pressure.
Donations to the local charity shop on Leather Lane market have also been affected. Manager Dee Waltham explained:
“The quality has gone right down. We used to get good donations but now it’s more Primark and less designer. The frequency of donations hasn’t changed, people are still giving, but now we are getting a lot of things that we can’t sell.

“We’re getting broken things, because people don’t want to pay for disposal, so we end up with rubbish on our door step everyday, sometimes it feels like a dumping ground. Then we have to pay for it to be removed.”

“We rely on the market to bring in customers, I don’t know what we’ll do if it closes.”

Some food and sundries markets are able to sustain a steady amount of customers by selling cheap, specialist foods. Ridley Road market, also known as Dalston market, has a reputation for its affordable fresh produce and ability to cater to the diverse community surrounding it. This summer it will benefit from a million pound regeneration to coincide with the 2012 Olympics. Hackney council will provide 165 larger pitches, as well as a new layout to make the market more attractive to shoppers. There will also be an improvement in waste collection and recycling facilities to help the environment around the market stay clean and green.

But even this market is not without its troubles, Hackney council have prosecuted traders and brought them to trial for selling fresh vegetables in pounds and ounces and not kilos. The traders who pled guilty to the charges were fined £615 in addition to £5700 court costs. Hackney council has also refused continued rental and demanded possession of storage properties for part of the market, leaving many Ridley Road traders without the fundamental provision.

Gary Roberts has been a green grocer at Ridley Road market for over 30 years; he explained how the council’s actions have had detrimental consequences for the traders:
“The council is not listening and it’s not helping the market. There have been over 40 stalls empty at the same time and it just gets worse. We are being driven out of the market”.

There are of course, resilient markets in London. Queen’s Road market in Newham generated £13 million in revenue for the local economy in 2009 and fills all 121 stalls every day. It is so profitable it has a waiting list for traders.

The shift of conventional necessities has seen an unlikely commodity establish its profitability in the market place. Fifteen feet away from a derelict clothing stall in Leather Lane market, a mobile phone vendor is inundated with customers. Since the recession the business in mobile phones and accessories has seen Tony’s profits triple.

“Yeah, business is very good,” he says with an animated smile. And why shouldn’t it be, now mobile phones are almost a requirement for the average person.
“Every one of my customers needs their phone, they can’t do without them, but they still want a bargain, and that’s why they come to the market.”

Tony has only been a mobile phone vendor for three years; he used to sell designer children’s clothes, but could not make a profit.

There is hope for our market places; a vital prospect for improvement is on the horizon. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, made a commitment to look into existing planning policies and find out whether or not they support street market retail outlets. He also commissioned a report, which was carried out by the London Assembly’s Economic Development, Culture, Sport and Tourism committee that reported although London’s markets benefited local communities culturally, socially and economically, many were struggling. The report underlined the critical threat of closure many markets in the capital face and urged immediate action be taken by the mayor to save traders who are at risk in the short term.

In his mayoral statement of intent, Boris Johnson pledged to ‘support street and farmers markets and their development and expansion.’ The mayor has proposed a revision of The London Plan, a strategic policy that will set out specific directions to councils on the importance of street markets for all of London’s boroughs. But the mayor has yet to provide a clear timeline for when the guidance will be finalised or set out a clear strategy for supporting street markets across the capital.
As a result the final version of this plan is not likely to take effect before 2011, which means many markets still remain under threat and it will be far too late for traders like Richard: “We’re a thing of the past, I live day by day, I don’t have any long term plans because the stall might not be around for much longer.”