Howard Read
Wolverhampton School of Art
Urban Street Markets: Illustrative practice as heritage – a subjective visual, historical, and literary exploration
Panel: Architecture
‘As the market emerges into place, its communicative acts of presence appear to other people as part of their environment – something to select from, to build meaning of self and of place, and each performed together – in place’ (Yates, 2019)
Street markets represent more than the materials they are constructed from they embody the lived experience and of their local communities and cultural memory. This authenticity is often co-opted and marketed in the drive for regeneration and gentrification. Despite this street markets have survived with a resilience and heritage that is under theorised or critically reflected on. From the mid-twentieth century migration and demographic change have led to adaptations, renewing communities, and providing a culture of informality (Kelley, 2019). Historically the traditions of the open-air Street Market as a night-time activity – often illicit and marginal have now become regulated selling spaces and survived economic upheavals, modern retail trends, and globalisation to remain a prominent daily aspect of life in London. Their structure and format are largely unchanged from ancient and medieval times – but this aspect of everyday life and its meaning are largely overlooked.
This paper will be in two parts, firstly looking at the historical legacy and secondly my own practice of documenting East Street Market, in Southeast London. I see my own drawings as being in a dialogue with the work of neglected Illustrator, Barbara Jones (1912-1978) and Mary Benadetta’s 1936 book on The London Street Markets with photographs by Laszlo Maholy-Nagy. Referencing post-war literature and contemporary academic and psychogeography writing on Street Markets (Tilley, 2017 and Kelley, 2022). This paper will evidence how a largely pre-modern informal selling space has survived and provided a cohesive sense of community, enhanced by migration to sustain an urban heritage of entrepreneurial necessity. There are clearly popular tropes and cliched characters associated with the street market which I intend to avoid by focusing on documentary drawing and the sensory and experiential aspect of the street market, the daily curation of setting-up, displaying, and selling. Memory and lived experience will be subjectively examined through drawing. Yates has suggested the curation of each stall ‘emerges as a little ecosystem of meaning’ (Yates, 2019).
Dr Howard Read is a London based artist and Illustrator and Senior Lecturer in Illustration at the Wolverhampton School of Art, University of Wolverhampton and an Associate Lecturer at CSM. His practice-based PhD is titled: The role of drawing in the regeneration of urban spaces. His research interests are in Illustration and drawing as a documentary process and the social and cultural issues that connect cities, urbanism and lived experience with stories and narrative.