Borough Market

Parliament abolished it

A market stood in Borough High Street itself until the middle of the eighteenth century. The Mayor and Commonalty of the City of London petitioned for its abolition on the grounds of "the great increase of coaches, carts and other carriages", and an Act of 28 George II, chapter 9, abolished it. In the same session the churchwardens and parishioners of St Saviour's obtained the right to open a new market on a site called the Triangle, south-west of their church, and local residents raised £6,000 to buy it. Trading on the present ground began in 1756.

So the market was stopped by statute and restarted as a different body on a different site. Both halves of that matter to the claims made for its age.

The legislation is not one Act and the dates in circulation are not alternatives but different instruments. Survey of London gives the abolition as 28 George II chapter 9, in 1755. The Charity Commission's register treats both 28 George II of 1754 and 30 George II of 1756 as governing documents, alongside later Acts of 1822, 1829, 1892, 1907 and 1930. Other accounts name a Southwark Market Act of 1755 with a second Act in the same year, or a Borough Market Act of 1756; the market's own pages and the London Museum date the parliamentary move to 1754 and the new market to 1756 and name no Act at all. The regnal year 28 George II runs across 1754 and 1755, which is why all three years appear. No primary text was available, so no single short title can be treated as settled.

On the church: the market sits immediately south-west of Southwark Cathedral, the 1756 ground lay south-west of what was then St Saviour's, and the new market was obtained by that parish's churchwardens and vestry. The address still includes Cathedral Street. But nothing establishes that the cathedral or the diocese owns any market land, or that the market stands on the ground of the medieval priory — the parish vestry was a different legal body from either.

The thousand years, and what the market itself now claims

The claim of a millennium of trading rests on a date of 1014, and the evidence for it is thinner than the claim. The substantive thread is Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, written about 1230 about events of 1014, which describes Southwark as a great market town in connection with the attack on London Bridge. That is a thirteenth-century Icelandic saga about an eleventh-century event, and it describes Southwark rather than a market on the present ground. No independent authority endorses 1014 as a founding date.

The market has quietly stopped making the claim. Its current history page does not mention 1014; the timeline there begins in the 1270s.

The one qualified endorsement from an independent body is the London Museum's, and it is worth quoting for its hedges rather than its headline: Borough Market, it says, has a good claim to being London's oldest surviving food market, and it gives the market's key date as 1276, treating 1014 only as evidence of trading in Southwark. Note all three qualifications — a claim rather than a fact, surviving rather than oldest, and 1276 rather than 1014.

The stronger forms — Britain's oldest market, a thousand years of continuous trading, oldest still on its original site — trace to the market's own materials and to Southwark Council, which awarded a commemorative plaque for 250 years of trading after a residents' vote. The last of those forms is self-evidently wrong of ground occupied only since 1756.

For comparison, the City of London makes no claim of being oldest for either of its own wholesale markets: Smithfield's earliest record is 1174, with market rights from a charter of 1327, and Billingsgate's key dates are 1327, 1400 and the Act of 1699 that made it a free and open market for all sorts of fish. Both are to cease trading by 2028, which will shortly change what any comparison means.

The only listed structure came from Covent Garden

There is no statutory list entry for the market buildings themselves. The single listed structure on the site is an import: list entry 1392690, the resited Floral Hall portico, Grade II, listed on 14 April 2008.

It was the southern front of the Floral Hall of 1858 to 1859, by Edward Middleton Barry, facing the piazza at the Royal Opera House. Taken down in the early 1990s and left surplus after the redevelopment there, it was stored in Wales, and the trustees acquired it for one pound. It was re-erected here about 2003 to 2004 as a frontage on Stoney Street, inside a two-storey extension by Greig + Stephenson. Historic England describes it as cast iron and glass, two storeys, three bays wide and one bay deep, painted silver, with a ground-floor arcade of square pillars, tall round-headed first-floor windows and a large radial fanlight — and records that arches, purlins and glazing bars were partly replaced in steel and plastic on re-erection, and that the interior is not of special interest. The arcade is open at ground level and a restaurant occupies the floor above.

The buildings that are not listed are the ones the market is known for. The cast-iron market structures are Henry Rose's, of 1851, with further work by Edward Habershon in 1863 and 1864. Both men were mainly church architects, which is where the Gothic cast of the detail and the ornateness of the ironwork come from. The Southwark Street entrance of 1932 the council describes as a monumental portal. Their protection is not listing but the Borough High Street conservation area.

The railway, and a lease that lasts as long as the trains

A viaduct was cut through the market from the 1860s — the market dates it to 1862, the council's appraisal to the London Bridge to Cannon Street link of 1866. What the trustees could do about it was constrained by their own founding Act, which barred them from alienating market land. That is the real restriction, and it is routinely reported instead as a clause forbidding the market ever to move. What it produced was a "flying" leasehold granted to the railway companies for as long as trains run over it, with the trustees compensated each time the viaduct is widened.

The Thameslink Programme drove the most recent remaking. A 400-metre viaduct runs through the market, crossing Borough High Street on a steel bridge routed to avoid the listed Globe Tavern. The nineteenth-century cast-iron market roofs were dismantled, restored and reconfigured to the new geometry, with a new entrance, a glazed hall and a new piazza; the works completed in 2013. The Wheatsheaf on Stoney Street lost its upper floor to the new viaduct, built between 2009 and 2011.

One of the market's main spaces exists because of all this. The Market Hall began as a temporary steel and plastic-membrane structure put up so that traders could keep trading through the works, and was kept.

The areas, and a name that does not exist

The trading areas are Three Crown Square, for larger producers and merchants; the Green Market, for small specialist produce traders; Borough Market Kitchen, for street food; the Market Hall; and Jubilee Place.

There is no "Jubilee Market". The name belongs to Covent Garden, not here. What exists is Jubilee Place, and the street-food operation within it is Borough Market Kitchen, which opened there in 2019 with more than twenty hot and cold stands at communal tables. The Green Market's stands moved into it, and the Green Market and Three Crown Square were given over to produce.

And the wholesale market has not gone, which most accounts assume. Four wholesalers appear among the trader types in the market's most recent published report, and Jubilee Place reverts to wholesale use once the street-food stands close for the day.

Who runs it

The market is a charity, registered as Borough Market (Southwark), number 1076940, registered on 6 August 1999 and unincorporated; "Trustees of the Borough Market" is a recorded working name.

Its governing document is that run of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Acts — plus a Charity Commission scheme of 21 March 2007, amended twice in 2012 and again in 2021 and 2022, and an order of 2005. So the picture of a trust frozen in eighteenth-century statute is wrong in both directions: the Acts remain in the governing document, and the Commission has reshaped the trust within living memory.

How many trustees there are depends where one looks. An account from the heritage press gives sixteen, who must live nearby. The Charity Commission's register lists ten. The market's own page lists eleven, two of whom are not on the register, while one on the register is not on the market's page. No source states how trustees are appointed; the market says only that they are chosen for the breadth and relevance of their skills. Shane Holland has chaired since 29 January 2024, and Alistair Maddox became chief executive on 1 September 2025, succeeding Jane Swift, who left that April — though the market's own senior-management page does not list a chief executive at all.

For the year to 31 March 2024, income was £7.66 million against expenditure of £7.90 million, and total funds stood at £95.8 million, none of it restricted.

No single trader figure can be given. The market's own directory says "more than 100 stalls, stands, restaurants, bars and shops" without a total. Its report for 2024 breaks the traders down by category into figures that sum to 137, while the narrative of the same document says about a hundred and twenty businesses, with roughly fifty-five pitches and sixty-four stalls. Three counts in one publication.

The attack, and what changed

The market was attacked on Saturday 3 June 2017 and reopened on 14 June, after a bell and a minute's silence — closed about eleven days.

What changed permanently is on the street rather than in the market. The southern end of Stoney Street, between Park Street and Southwark Street, has been closed to traffic ever since. Southwark Council consulted on making the closure permanent, the consultation closing in November 2022, and in December 2023 its cabinet approved £900,000 for fixed security barriers to replace the concrete blocks. No outcome has been reported since.

The memorial is not in the market. A plaque to the eight people killed and forty-eight injured stands outside Southwark Cathedral, by the river.

What the market is choosing to be

The live question here is which traders belong, and it has been argued in public through 2026.

The trust's position, published by its chair on 30 September 2026: a Food Policy adopted in 2022 guides trader selection; new applicants must align with the trust's principles; established traders are assessed when their leases expire, in a process he describes as nuanced and even-handed; about a third of tenants and stallholders have been through it and most received new agreements, sometimes with agreed development goals; restaurant tenants face higher expectations. He concedes that some of the changes are a source of controversy and that reviewing long-standing traders is emotionally charged, and he notes two limits on the trust's control — some restaurant spaces are not trust-controlled, and some stallholders hold leases that let them sell more freely and do not oblige them to follow the Food Policy.

Two cases gave that argument its public shape, and they ended differently. Bread Ahead, a bakery at the market since 2013, was told its lease would not be renewed; its founder said in September 2026 that the reason given was its international franchising, and that eighty-three London jobs were at risk. It was resolved on 21 October 2026, when he accepted an extension of the lease to 2028 that the market said had been on the table since July, the chair adding that the trust's position had not changed. Maria's Market Cafe on Stoney Street, trading since 1961, had a five-year lease end in the summer of 2026 which was not renewed; a petition followed in July, the market said it treats trader details as confidential and declined to comment further while discussions continued, and no outcome has been reported.

The trade press has carried both sides of the franchising question, arguing variously for reconsidering the rule with strict vetting and against franchising as a weak test of quality. The trust has not changed the policy.

Opening days

The pattern dates from April 2023: closed on Mondays, except the May and August bank holidays when it opens at ten; Tuesday to Friday from ten to five; Saturday from nine to five; Sunday from ten to four. Restaurants and bars inside the market stay open on Mondays. Not every trader attends every day, and the market runs seven days a week in December.

One correction to a common assumption: Sunday opening began only in 2021, and the market describes it as the first time in its recent history.

Visiting

Entry is free. The nearest station is London Bridge.

On step-free access the two halves of that station are documented very differently. For the National Rail platforms, Network Rail gives a clear statement: a category A station with step-free level access to all platforms by lift, ramps kept at the station and tactile warnings on all platforms in use. For the Underground there is no clean street-to-platform statement from the transport authority — only that step-free interchange between the Jubilee and Northern lines is partly at street level in both directions, with lifts serving the Northern line to the Borough High Street entrance and the Jubilee line from the main ticket hall. At present there is no down escalator in service from the Borough High Street entrance to the Jubilee line, with a one-way system in operation. The authority's own combined page for the station gives no National Rail accessibility information at all.

The market publishes useful detail of its own: the public areas are on a single ground-floor level with no lifts or stairs, though some of the restaurant buildings have several storeys; surfaces vary and include cobbles, with some parts harder to reach than others; and there are four fully fitted accessible lavatories during trading hours, needing no radar key. Dogs are allowed on a lead or carried.

What is not Borough Market

The surrounding streets have filled with places that read as part of the market and are not. Borough Yards is a separate private retail and leisure development in the railway arches off Stoney Street and Clink Street, opened in phases in 2021 and 2022. Vinegar Yard is on St Thomas Street by the station; Maltby Street Market and the Ropewalk are further east; Flat Iron Square is separate again. Borough Kitchen is a cookshop chain with a branch on Borough High Street and no connection. The restaurants and pubs along Stoney Street and Bedale Street are not all trust tenants. And there is an unrelated Victorian market hall called Borough Market in Halifax, which turns up in searches for this one.

One more, because it is often promised: the market does not run a cookery school. It has held cookery demonstrations in the past, and there is a verifiable baking school on the site — but that is run by a trader, not by the market.