Queen's Market is on Green Street, Upton Park, London E13 9BA.
Queen's Market - a veritable human coral !
Tube: Upton Park Station, District & Hammersmith & City Lines
(30 mins from Central London, 15 minutes from Mile End)
Bus: 104 (from Stratford), 238, 58, 330, 376
Car parking: whilst short-stay parking is available on Green Street, we advise you park at Shaftesbury Road car park, or Queen's Road car park. Both are reasonably priced.
"For over 100 years, this street market (80 stalls, 60 local shops) has reflected the culturally diverse community that surrounds it. It's a magnet for food buffs with a huge range of fruit and veg from all over Africa, Asia and the West Indies, with everything from carrots and cabbages to okra, methi and green bananas. There are stalls selling wet and dried(salt cod) fish, sari fabrics and silks, African fabrics, trimmings, CDs, undies, wigs, Indian rugs, jewellery, hair products (wigs, combs, ornaments), toys, sunglasses and plenty more besides. Sadly the market is under threat: Newham council (against the wishes of the local community) wants to sell the site to a developer (St Modwen) to build a giant supermarket. Happily, the locals are protesting hard against it. Get down there and join the campaign."
"The crowds were thickest outside Queen's Market, a cacophony of stalls close to the station.
......Mir was waiting, but a closer look at this market was irresistible. I strolled with my helmet through the stalls, inhaling Central Asia again, feeling like an alien in the city of my birth. Women in saris swarmed around the vegetable stands, bargaining with the stall-holders, sifting through the foodstuffs with practised brown fingers. Among the recognisable goods were species of vegetation that were new to me - mooli and tindora, papadi and cho-cho, patra and parval, long dhudi, posso, china karella. There were over a dozen types of flour with names like dhokra and dhosa mix, mathia and oudhwa, mogo, rajagro, singoda. There were packets of moth beans and gunga peas, sliced betelnut and sago seeds. There was a mouth freshener called mukhwas manpasand, and something called red chowrie, that was not to be confused with brown chorie, which according to the label was also known as pink cow peas."
Quoted from Kandahar Cockney by James Ferguson (Harper Collins, 2004)
Queen's Market - Loved by Londoners, neglected and unloved by Newham council.
Traders have written to the council about the following issues, yet they have been ignored.
1) The inadequate and infrequent nature of the cleaning regime.
2) Toilet facilities. These are invariably locked.
3) Parking. Many of the parking meters are out of action.
4) A leaking roof. This has resulted in damaged stock and hazardousconditions for shoppers and traders alike.
5) Recycling. This is near non-existent.
6) Marketing. Little or no effort is made to publicise the market.
7) Lighting. Poor maintenance. The lack of access to natural light.
8) The lack of any decorations for Christmas, Diwali and Eid.
9) Temporary pitches. Traders are keen to see all pitchesoccupied, yetit would appear that there is a marked reluctance to grant temporary licences.
10) Modernising the archaic and inefficient rent collection procedures.
11) Enforcement notices. Why are the market inspectors being denied access to new books of enforcement notices ?
12) Retail units being left shuttered up and empty.
13) Need for a lift from market level to first floor parking area.
Other boroughs openly publicise their markets and understand the benefits of traditional street markets to exist in London....
Matthew d'Ancona, Editor of TheSpectator has described the FoQM campaign and website as; "The most exciting example of grassroots web politics..."
It now transpires that if St Modwen get their way they intend to build an 18-storey tower block on the Queen's Market site, some 370 executive apartments (and rising!) will also further exacerbate the problemof parking. Why the silence from Newham council on this ? Why has the Newham Recorder been so timid inits reporting of the Queen's Market story? People have begun to suspect a near symbiotic relationship between the paper and Newham Council. Call Colin 'Nipper' Grainger (the Editor) Tel:- 0208 472 1421 and see if you can find out why the paper is so reluctant to give this story greater prominence.
Maybe the power of advertising revenue ensures an unwillingness to want to probe or even dare to criticise.
