Watch repairer, Kensington Market, approx 1994
I’d been going to Kensington Market since I was a teenager, like everyone else, picking up cheap clothes and having terrible fashion sense, but it was a fun place to wander around with your mates on a Saturday. As I got older and picked up a camera when I was eighteen, my bubble extended another metre and I started to notice the world.
Rummaging through my negatives, I found this picture, one of two, taken in approximately 1994 of a stall-holder with his fascinating stall who was just inside the market, very close to one of the entrances. I have no idea of his name or stall’s name, and of course, the market closed exactly twenty-three years ago today on 29 January 2000. Stupid owners. There was no reprieve and the place was demolished a year later. A PC World opened up instead. Honestly, the worst kind of know-nothing overpriced box-pushers, a war crime. Some stalls apparently moved to a new location on Queensway, but that place was filled with junk and tat and I remain heartbroken for the Kensington Market workers, shoppers and future kids that would never be able to go there. Markets are so fundamental to a society that they should have special protection.
