Positioning Borough Market as Market and Marketplace

This chapter introduces the case study through which the arguments of this book are developed: London’s Borough Market. It explains the relevance of this particular example in examining the complex dynamics between market and marketplace, and explains the importance of understanding these dynamics through the lenses of place and place-making, which highlight the material, social-spatial, temporal and imaginative practices that reproduce such marketplaces and markets. Urban marketplaces such as Borough Market once played an important role in food provisioning for the City. Typically occupying positions on the urban periphery, they served as a key interface between urban and rural economies. With changing systems of food provision and urban political and cultural economies more generally, as well as broader shifts in the tastes and expectations of urban residents and consumers, such marketplaces are increasingly valued for the consumer culture and experiences of consumption they seemingly engender, rather than for their roles in food provision. This chapter details the history of Borough Market and contextualizes it as part of broader economic, social and cultural change within the city. It charts the marketplaces history as a key food market for London, and its decline in the last half of the twentieth century. It also presents the marketplace’s re-emergence as a fine and alternative food market in parallel to new and emergent forms of ‘alternative’ food production and consumption, and the ways which they have transformed marketplaces as sites of urban consumer culture increasingly orientated towards conspicuous consumption.