Surrey Street and the Fruity Market Triangle
Leaving his Fiat Cinquecento in the Ikea car park, our guide takes his friends on a tram to central Croydon. They get off the tram at Wellesely Road and wander past Greggs and Office Angels towards George Street.
A minute or so later they find themselves in the middle of Croydon town centre. They are standing on top of Crown Hill, close to the Hospital of Holy Trinity, the almshouses established by Archbishop Whitgift. For a moment our guide considers how remarkable it is that these flinty old buildings have been in continuous service as a home for the elderly for over 400 years. A tram clangs past, across Crown Hill and down Church Street, past KFC and towards the tower of the Parish Church.
They stand with their backs to the Almshouses and look south west at a lump of stuff. Tall 1880s red-brick fancy facades, binge-drink bars, a black and cream curved Deco corner and a big dumb 1990s Vue Multiplex with a big dumb roof. This lump of stuff occupies a large triangle of land right in the middle of the town, on the side of a long hill which gives way to the lower ground and lower roofs of old Croydon and the springs of the Wandle.
“Close your eyes and watch this”, he says.
Our guide closes his eyes too and then slowly begins to erase the massive triangular extrusion of bulk. He deletes bricks, cinema screens, Tiger Tiger, Nando’s and squeaky undercroft service yards one by one. He removes pavement drinking areas with outdoor heaters and a Jessops bargain camera shop. He rubs out the longest holographic display in Europe and scratches out that big dumb roof with its Death Star landscape of rooftop plant rooms, vents and galvanized service walkways.
When all the stuff has been erased, what’s left is a large triangular open space.
“Um, that was actually quite impressive” says J.
“Yes, quite…but what are we looking at?” asks K “Should I open my eyes?”
“That is the ancient market place of Croydon”, he replies “And no. Keep your eyes closed!”
Now our guide imagines it medieval. Muddy and smoky with its perimeter defined by a ramshackle of timber, wattle and daub constructions rather than the Yates Wine Lodge, Iceland supermarket and 1960s shopping arcade that have taken their place. He imagines it busy with mild and nobly people and beasts. Busy with all kinds of exchange. A dirty, noisy, bustle. Brown and yellow and red and damp and muddy. Like a Breugel.
His feet squelching in imaginary mud and straw, our guide then watches the triangle being filled up again; fast-forwarding through the centuries. A flickering stop frame animation. Over time the market triangle becomes home to more and more permanent stalls, then to make-shift shacks, then to crooked brick and timber slums packed full of people, then to 1880s civic fanciness and department stores, then to slick 1990s cinemas, bars and fitness centres, until finally he’s back in 2008 again and only the western edge of the market remains as a fragment of the medieval market triangle. It is called Surrey Street and it is London’s oldest street market.
If Purley Way is Croydon’s 21st Century, non-place market-place, then Surrey Street is where you will find its good old fashion market-place, packed full of Genus Loci goodness and the ghosts of centuries’ worth of human exchange.
Today, there’s a market on Surrey Street every day except Sunday. It must be one of Greater London’s hidden gems (or one of Greater Surrey’s hidden gems – depending on which way you look at it). It is untouched by TV chefs and three-wheeler buggies. You will find few ponces here.
The faces of the market traders at the northern end of the market are as English and mild and nobly as the fruit and veg on their stalls – and the same faces go back dozens of generations. They have kept out the stalls selling ciabatta, soft cheeses, olives, dried peppers and other such exotic yuppie goods. They’ve left that to the French and Italian markets on North End. But they have half opened the door to mobile phone covers, batteries, Chinese veg and jerk chicken.
As a summer seat of the Archbishops of Canterbury, Croydon was always an important place, and its Archbishops – living in the Old Palace a spud’s throw from Surrey Street – have had a huge influence on the place. In 1276 Archbishop Kilwardby got a Charter from Edward I to enable him to collect tolls from a Wednesday market and an annual nine-day fair in June, which makes Surrey Street the remnants of the oldest street market in London.
A second charter, for a Thursday market, and a three-day fair, 20th – 22nd September, was issued in 1314; and a third, for a Saturday market, and a one-day fair on 24 June, in about 1343. Apparently when the Archbishop’s officials turned up to collect the tolls in 1344, they were violently assaulted, ‘so that their life was despaired of’.
Along with those medieval brusings, the football riots that happened around central Croydon in 2004, the drunken puking and fighting that happens on its streets after weekend dancing and binging, and the stories of Surrey Street barrow-boys beating up long-haired students in the 1980s reveal the violent streak that runs beneath Surrey Street’s cobbled surface; an angry stream that mingles with the gentler Wandle springs and rivulets and the blood and bones of beasts from the ancient meat markets.
Having been gradually filled in with a ramshackle of buildings, by the 19th Century the whole market triangle was crammed with a tight network of narrow streets and alleys. In 1861 the population within the triangle was nearly 600, with an average of more than 11 people living in each small house. Many of the buildings were lodging houses, each with an average of 24 lodgers. Apparently some of the better conducted premises were run by Italians and occupied by Italian organ grinders who entertained the people of Croydon with their little monkeys and all the latest Victorian pop songs.
Croydon’s organ grinders would hire pianos and organs from Italian manufacturers in London and replace the music with popular new tunes every 6 months or so. After a few years of grinding out pop on the streets of Croydon they would return to Italy relatively wealthy men.
Many prostitutes also lived and traded in the market triangle at that time, adding to the impression of a busy, sleazy, exotic, Hogarthian slum. The centre of all kinds of exchange.
Recently, upstanding Croydonians have expressed disgust about the former ‘For Your Eyes Only’ lap-dancing club at the end of Surrey Street and its replacement: the ‘Larry Flynt Hustler Strip Club’. However, these uses seem to fit well with the ancient character of the market Triangle. Surrey Street’s contemporary market can only hint at the market triangle’s former fruitiness though; the extent and variety of exchange that have taken place there and the richness of experience that it has offered over the years.
Along with the cheap lodgings, painted ladies and fancy Italian organ grinders, there was once a big ‘Fleshe-markett’, a beast market, a fish market on Middle Street, a dairy market, a livestock market and a corn market within the market triangle.
The corn market was housed in a purpose built hall on the High Street known as the ‘Market House’ which doubled up as Croydon’s Town Hall. It was considered the most important corn market south of the Thames. Daniel Defoe, in the 1720s, described Croydon as ‘a great Corn-Market, but chiefly for Oats and Oatmeal, all for London still’. The building was rebuilt in 1809 as the ‘Town Hall’, although the large open ground floor was still primarily used for the corn market. This hall was also cleared and converted in to a Criminal Court when the Assizes were held in Croydon.
The beast market was originally held in Surrey Street, with animals penned in the yard of the Three Tunns Inn. Broken animal bones are still turned up.
William Page, writing about the scene in the 1820s, remembered how ‘the town on Saturday was indeed a lively one . . . a continuous stream of peasants flocking in to make their weekly purchases.’ This busy, varied scene would also have been familiar to John Ruskin, whose grandmother was the landlady of the King’s Head Tavern – an Inn opposite the market triangle.
As Croydon became more urbanized, however, trade fell away and moved to shops and stores. By the late 1860s, the general market was in decline. The main corn market also suffered. It was moved to Thursday (the day of the cattle market), but this did not stop its decline. By the early 1870s, the corn market had been squeezed out of the Town Hall, and had moved to a room at the King’s Head. The Dairy Market closed down in the 1870s. After the mid 19th Century – all but livestock markets had declined.
As the various markets declined, the area’s population continued to increase. The triangle fizzed and mouldered in a state of ‘moral and physical decay’. An 1888 article in the Croydon Chronicle described it as “a human moral piggery that, for depravity, either Newcastle or Manchester, might match, but certainly not surpass.”
The response was an example of Croydon’s history of ambitious ‘regeneration’ projects and an expression of a strong sense of local civic pride which continues to this day.
In 1883 the newly formed municipal borough corporation set up a High Street Improvement Committee. This set about launching a competition to seek an architect to improve High Street and the market triangle. The competition was won by JM Brydon, architect of Chelsea Town Hall and the government offices on Parliament Square. However this scheme didn’t go ahead. It was initially considered too expensive and was scaled down and value engineered, which actually effectively saved Surrey Street and the existing medieval remnants of Bell Hill. But the scheme was finally killed off when the Council disagreed over whether to fund the project using profits from Croydon’s own water company.
However, the project to ‘improve’ the market triangle slums soon resurfaced. In 1888 Alderman Francis Coldwells – a self-made man, non-conformist and temperance advocate – set up the Middle Row Improvement Committee.
The Committee’s new scheme involved significant compulsory purchase and a deal with the Brighton Railway Company who owned land close-by on Katherine Street, including the old Croydon Central Railway Station. The new scheme involved removing the old Town Hall corn market in the market triangle, replacing it with a brand new Town Hall on Katherine Street, along with a new Library and Police Station and creating a new sunken garden on the site of the railway station. Ten new cottages on Mint Walk for the dispossessed – decanted from their Middle Street slum – would be Croydon’s first Council houses.
Despite being objected to by some local residents from the affluent Park Hill area – who complained about the increase in rates associated with the big project and a ‘loss of quaintness’ that would come about with the removal of the warren-like medieval slum at the heart of the town – the new County Borough of Croydon’s ‘Croydon Improvement Act’ received Royal Assent in 1890.
Demolition of the medieval market triangle started in 1893 and the area had been comprehensively redeveloped with large, ornate, red brick buildings by the end of the decade. Gone were the little lanes and the clapboard ramshackle. Gone were the overcrowded slums, lodging houses. Italians and painted ladies.
A fancy commemorative water fountain was built on the junction between High Street and Surrey Street to celebrate completion of this ambitious improvement scheme. It remains to this day – going unnoticed next to the flower stall and Millets camping and outdoors shop.
The third Town Hall – expressive of Victorian civic grandeur – opened in 1896. The complex included a small Corn Exchange in Katharine Street, but this was never popular and closed in 1907. Corn dealing on a small scale returned briefly to the King’s Head, before disappearing from Croydon altogether.
But what of about the market? Did all of this super ambitious Victorian regeneration kill it off? Well, nearly. By the early 20th Century the only survival was the general Saturday market in Surrey Street. This had held on, and it represented the only link back to the markets of the time of Archibishop Kilwardby and those which are bound to have existed before he granted his charter.
However, by 1922, Surrey Street market was showing signs of revival – being held daily – possibly in response to demand created by increased food prices in the shops and growing suburban population in Croydon. The market triangle’s fruity character was bubbling up to the surface again.
Now it’s the early 21st Century and that daily market is still there; every day except Sunday.
Sipping a pint of Ordinary at the old Dog and Bull, our guide has got used to the absence of music and listens to the background cries of “Eeer-y’arGetchastrawbriz” and “FiftyFifty!” from the female Noddy Holder look-alike market trader outside. He un-wraps the cellophane from a cheese roll taken from under a cracked and yellowing plastic dome on the counter and sinks his teeth in deep. Looking around, there are those same mild, nobly faces. An old man on a stool gazes across the bar in silence. A man with a curtain beard and a woman with frizzy hair are mumbling to each other next to the piano. A man with a leather jacket and a leathery face is laughing with the antipodean barman.
On the wall there’s the famous Young’s publicity photograph of Prince Charles when he pulled a pint at the Dog and Bull in the 1980s alongside some old black and white photographs of the market and the Almshouses in the early 20th Century and a ‘Winter Warmer Ale’ poster.
www.pubs.com describes the Dog and Bull as ‘a good old ‘spit and sawdust’ local with bare floorboards, smoky panelling and cream painted walls.’ And apparently the well known beer writer Roger Protz once wrote – “The day Young’s turn the Dog and Bull into a wine bar called Johnnies is the day I emigrate”. Our guide hasn’t ever heard of the well known beer writer Roger Protz and recalls Phil Collins making a similar comment about what he’d do if Labour ever won the general election. Or was it Kenny Everett? An image of Roger Protz begins to form in our guide’s mind; a disturbing mix of Collins and Everett with a Union Jack waistcoat. It’s starting to put him off his pint of Ordinary, so he thinks of something else instead.
In the 1990s the Dog and Bull extended in to a neighbouring shop – but you’d be hard-placed to find the joins. The neighbouring shop was apparently where Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs of cult indie pop band St Etienne had a Saturday job. They’d go to nearby Beanos – the world-renowned second hand record shop – during lunch breaks to flick through its packed racks of vinyl.
Beanos is unique. Set up in 1975 it moved from its small shop on Surrey Street to a large old Victorian printer’s warehouse in nearby Middle Street in the 1990s. Until recently it was the largest second hand record shop in Europe, spread over three floors, with a 1950s style café at the top. However, faced with an explosion in internet shopping, its owner David Lashmar – former member of the psychedelic rock band ‘Dead Sea Fruit’ – has recently had to scale down the operation to keep the place alive. It remains a wonderful shop though, and plans are afoot to convert the upper floors in to an open independent marketplace – right at the heart of the old market triangle.
Another place of musical significance on Surrey Street is ‘Mixing Records’, formerly known as Big Apple Records, and occupying part of an old medieval row of shops called ‘Butcher’s Row’. This shop was home to the development of ‘Dubstep’ – an underground dance music genre which came out of Croydon around the turn of the milenium and has since gone on to be influentual and popular internationally. Succesful Dubstep artists Hatcha and Skream worked in the shop whilst others with equally evocative names like Loefah, Zed Bias, Digital Mystikz, Horsepower and El-B were apparently often to be found hanging around there.
Our guide imagines that Surrey Street’s 19th Century’s organ-grinders would probably have had equally exotic names.
They wouldn’t have known the finger-licking delights of KFC though, which currently serves up its family buckets of chicken and beans from the other remaining medieval building in the market triangle. Before this wonky, patched up, timber-framed building was a KFC, it was a chicken shop owned by TV presenter and former Crystal Palace, Arsenal and England striker, Ian Wright.
It’s a ramshackle remnant of Croydon’s medieval slums, although a bit of a Ship of Theseus. He’s pretty sure that the warped old beams in the first floor roof space are original though, and it is magic that these remain – spotty teenagers chomping on greasy battered chicken beneath them – especially given Croydon’s continuous obsession with progress, renewal and regeneration.
Along with the 1880s clearance of the market triangle slums, Surrey Street was the scene of another demonstration of Croydon’s Victorian ambition and obsession with progress.
Surrey Street is on the ridgeline of the North Downs and the River Wandle bubbles up around here. In the middle ages the lower Old Town around the Archibishops’ Old Palace was filled with rivulets, streams and ponds. The streams and ponds were culverted by the Croydon Local Board of Health, and the only remaining clue of this former watery world is the Victorian Pumping Station tucked between the old Telephone exchange and Surrey Street multi-storey car park. It stands empty like a romantic folly; a polychromatic mix between a Venetian Palazzo and an English castle’s gatehouse; built in 1851, it is beautifully contemporary with local boy Ruskin’s Stone’s of Venice.
The Croydon Local Board of Health was set up in 1849 in response to the Public Health Act. The Board worked quickly, setting about a programme of pioneering work in sanitary science which saw Croydon soon became the first town in the country to receive the benefits of public water supply and sewerage. The water supply came from the Wandle springs. Water was pumped from the Pumping Station at Surrey Street up to the equally Italianate and romantic water tower at Park Hill.
Thames Water still pump from Surrey Street. The pumping machinery was moved from the Victorian Pumping Station years ago. The replacement pumps are housed in a utilitarian box next to the steps of the beautiful old folly. The contrast in the design of these pump housings tells the story of a loss of architectural exuberance and confident expression of civic pride over the past 150 years. Venetian polychromatic brickwork, castellations and gothic arches have been replaced with a dumb, metal box.
However, the site is soon to be the scene of the latest wave of Croydon’s ambition. Thames Water’s box will soon be screened and the space around the Pumping Station turned in to an urban ‘piazza’. Next door, the old telephone exchange is being converted in to luxury apartments and a new block wrapping the multi-storey car park will include flats and snazzy new boutique shops.
Our guide has taken his friends up the escalators to the top floor of the Vue multiplex. They stand at the huge window which looks down over Surrey Street and out over the roofs of Old Town. In its mish-mash composition, it looks as medieval as it ever has.
“Somewhere amongst that lot there’s apparently a big boiler where an old Surrey Street family boil up fresh beetroot every day”, he says.
Below, a building site has been cleared and a big hole has been dug for foundations. He wonders what the contractors have unearthed and where the ancient spoil has been disposed of. Striations of mud have been made visible; the compacted debris of centuries. Bones and rotten vegetables and bits of old buildings.
The market is being closed and packed away for the day. Boys wheel barrows down side alleys and lock them up in shacks. Battered cauliflower, damp cabbage bits and waves of cardboard are being swept up in to the kerbs and thrown in to the back of a rubbish lorry, its orange lamps flashing in the lead lights of the Dog and Bull.c
Super great writing. Really..