At Dalston’s Ridley Road Indoor Market, a Community Fights for Its Survival
Following a spate of evictions at markets in Elephant and Castle, Brixton, and Shepherd’s Bush, a landlord and Hackney Council have met resistance on Ridley Road. Report by Amel Mukhtar.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles. A last reminder that the Food in Print Magazine Fair is tomorrow at St Giles Cripplegate. There will be more than fifty independent food magazines to browse, along with pastries from Lucky Yu Bakery. You can find all the information about the fair here. Remember, it is completely free to attend – no tickets needed. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!
Before we get into today’s newsletter, a quick update on the situation at Brixton Plaza. Evictions of small food businesses are happening all across London right now – we are currently working on four separate articles about them, including today’s newsletter on Ridley Road by Amel Mukhtar. However, there is a spot of good news. This week, the twenty-seven traders of Brixton Plaza have been granted an injunction from the High Court stopping their eviction until the landlord, Governside Limited, obtains a court order to do so. There is also hope that the traders’ precarious tenancies are protected under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954, which ‘provides business tenants with statutory rights to proper notice, compensation in certain circumstances, and protection from eviction without a court order.’ For the meantime, Brixton Plaza will go on as usual – please do go down and give the traders your support and custom if you get the chance.
Today’s article is not paywalled, but to report on situations like Brixton Plaza and Ridley Road we rely solely on reader subscriptions. To support this work, please consider a subscription to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, which gives you access to the entire back catalogue, including all of our restaurant coverage and guides.
‘Certain food you get here, you can’t get anywhere else,’ says Wess, a trader at the Ridley Road indoor market. He’s been trading here for fifteen years, after arriving from Montserrat twenty years ago.
Inside Wess’s compact grocery shop sit sea moss packets, cerasee leaves, moringa powder and incense sticks. There are pops of colour from Sun Lolly boxes and packets of Kool-Aid and Shirley biscuits. In one of the fridges is a full shelf of malt drinks (Supermalt, Mighty Malt, Vita Malt, Malta Guinness); underneath are glass bottles of Fanta and Ting.
This market offers a taste of home for Hackney’s Afro-Caribbean community. Every so often, Wess is reunited with people he hasn’t seen for years. ‘I see people that left home twenty years ago … They didn’t tell you they’re coming here,’ he recalls. ‘We might’ve grown up together and when we come to England, someone might live in Birmingham [for example]. But then everyone comes to Ridley.’
Dinka, his friend keeping company by the register, a Rastafarian man with a grey beard and loc cap, adds: ‘People look forward to coming here, just to get a feeling – because then you’re among your own.’
The indoor market sits in the heart of Dalston, inside what was once a Tesco. The community that has been built there is a spot of sunshine in a country that often feels cold to Afro-Caribbean migrants – like today, 31 March, the day of the proposed eviction of traders from the market.
It’s a fate Wess and his fellow traders have been trying to come to terms with for the past two months, asking themselves what will become of their grocery stores, record shops, fabric and tailoring services, shoe shops and beauty and grooming outlets. Back on 17 February, Wess and the others were sent letters by the property owner, Larochette Real Estate, saying they had six weeks to vacate the premises, due to ‘antisocial behaviour’ in the market.
Yet there has been little clarity on the precise conditions of the eviction. Some traders are under the impression that it’s a temporary closure affecting them all, while others understand that only a select few will be able to return. Even if the eviction is only temporary, there’s still the question of ‘who’s going to pay for us in the months you plan to close it for’, Wess says. There’s no trust that the market will ever be reopened once it’s closed.
Since it purchased the market eight years ago, Larochette Real Estate has already attempted to evict the traders and turn the building into luxury flats twice, first in 2018 and then again in 2020. These proposed redevelopments inspired resistance from the community, and in 2022, Hackney Council stepped in and committed to take over the lease for fifteen years (at £306,000 per year rent) once Larochette completed a six-month renovation. But now, four years later, traders tell me that after being turfed out for long periods for the revamp, Larochette still hasn’t completed the work, and the council has done nothing about it. In fact, Hackney Council has not taken over the lease and has reverted to the position that the building is privately owned and therefore out of their control. ‘The council ain’t doing nuttin’ at all. [They’re] all in this [together],’ Dinka tells me.
The council’s offer to traders is that they can open a stall in the middle of the outdoor market, which does not work for most of the businesses. For Wess, with his fridges and boxes of confectionery and fridges that can currently be shuttered and reopened each day, an outdoor stall is not a feasible alternative: ‘Am I gonna put my stuff in the middle of the market, coming out and packing up every morning?’
As reported by The Londoner, the indoor market was bought by Larochette in 2016 for £6.5 million. Larochette, which is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, is owned by Guy Ziser and his father, Shmuel, who appeared in the Panama Papers. Together, the pair own or direct roughly fifty companies, including Rainbow Properties, which manages the Ridley Road indoor market.
Larochette and Rainbow have shirked basic responsibilities. Since the renovations began, they have not installed heating. Wess tells me that leadership has never met with him or other traders. There’s no on-site office or office manager – just security. ‘When you ask something, they don’t respond,’ he says. ‘I’m paying you for providing me with a service. You take my money every month and you haven’t come one time.’
Furthermore, the police have claimed that Larochette misrepresentated concerns about antisocial behaviour in the eviction notices it issued to traders. Although the police had issued a Community Protection Warning (which, as The Londoner reported, was due to ‘the continued failure of the building owner [to take] reasonable and necessary measures to address safety concerns’), they never suggested that the market should be shut down.
‘When you come in here you don’t find no issues whatsoever, just people trading,’ Wess says. He feels that the landlord is weaponising a stereotype. ‘Do the statistics and see how much Caribbean people have a business in here,’ he adds. Ever since the Windrush era, when Caribbean people were encouraged to come to Britain to fill labour shortages, they have been cruelly disenfranchised. Increasingly they’re being pushed out of areas that they’ve played a huge part in building (often via market stalls), areas like Hackney, Brixton and Notting Hill. ‘Then they want to come and tell us about Windrush, like we’re supposed to celebrate coming back into slavery after we were freed,’ Wess frowns. ‘We come back to build a white man’s empire when we can’t live in it. And we’re supposed to celebrate being Windrush? … There’s nothing to celebrate about it.’
The Ridley Road traders refuse to be kicked out so unceremoniously. On the planned eviction day, 31 March, a protest takes place. The ragtag group that forms outside the market is a microcosm of Hackney: women in wheelchairs, hijabis, queer fashion guys, purple-haired liberals, filmmakers in keffiyehs, club baddies, goth-lite guys, mothers with colourful braids, socialists in army caps, elderly couples, all united in mission. They hold up red flags and makeshift cardboard signs reading ‘Don’t Evict, Stop Greedy Landlords’ and ‘Protect Our Traders’. The Caribbean traders stand in front of the door, watching despondently.
By 4:30pm, the individual stalls are already shuttered. Outside, a protester asks: ‘Has the landlord been here? Has anyone seen the landlord? Has the Mayor of Hackney been here? Has anyone spoken to the Mayor of Hackney? Shame!’ A speaker outlines the demands of the protest: that everyone should be able to return to the indoor market, without exception, and that if the building closes, traders need to be adequately paid. A Caribbean man on the side yells, ‘This is Windrush market!’
Watching the scene with bemusement from the back are three massive security guards, who were sent as muscle that morning, Dinka informs me. One is vaping, smirking through fat clouds, while the ringleader wears a black fur coat. At 5:30pm, they spring into action, moving to shutter the doors. Protestors, led by Mariam Bafo, a British-Somali community organiser, head inside to stop them, saying that they plan to occupy the space until the landlord agrees to the traders’ terms.
When protestors stand directly underneath the shutters, fur coat tells the muscle to just pull the shutters down anyway. The protestors try to appeal to their conscience: ‘We’re all immigrants here.’ The guy with the vape in his hand chuckles and kind of nods – he appreciates the point. But fur coat calls the police, and a squad of four in fluorescents arrives, led by a blonde woman with hard eyes. She tells the protesters and traders to leave, that they can collect their stuff tomorrow. But they refuse: not without a written agreement. Not without any of their demands met.
One protester, a British-Caribbean woman, tells me that this is exactly how she was tricked into losing her livelihood. ‘We lost our site in SE16, and our landlord lived in the Costa del Sol,’ she says of PlushSE16. ‘Five businesses … All working, all popular. Twenty-two years on the ground. Part of a community.’ The landlords told her she could retrieve her stock the day after the eviction, but she was never able to get it back. ‘We’re still not trading, still not earning … That’s been two years now.’
A tsunami of shutdown attempts has hit small food markets in London. Shepherd’s Bush Market, Brixton Village and Plaza and Seven Sisters indoor market are also engaged in fights to continue operating. Others, like PlushSE16 and traders in Elephant & Castle, have already been shut down. These evictions have mostly affected ethnic minorities, with Caribbeans being hit hard. ‘They give us a very hard fight,’ Wess says. ‘We, the ones that went into slavery … they’re always fighting to get us out.’
The irony – or, really, the precise way such inequality and corruption is able to function – is that in some of these cases, the shadowy property developer threatening eviction is incorporated in Caribbean tax havens. While the maligned face of immigration painted by parties like Reform is working-class Black and brown people who have made hotspots like Hackney attractive and valuable (the inverse of the so-called no-go areas that figures on the right portray them to be), the people who are truly making the city unliveable are the often-invisible wealthy ‘expat’ and non-domicile property developers. While they gut the city’s pubs, cinemas and markets to replace them with luxury flats, they feel none of the dearth left behind. The luxury flats often sit unoccupied, while housing prices skyrocket. London gets hollowed out by people who do not care that they’re turning the city into a ghost town.
In the end, the police decide that it’s a civil dispute and leave. It’s around 6:30pm, and the muscle is getting antsy too – as long as the protestors are occupying the building, they cannot do anything, it seems. After such a bitter battle, this is a big win. The traders and protestors are galvanised. Dinka is laughing and smiling. ‘Security a-run out!’ he says, beaming. ‘We ain’t going nowhere!’
Wess is laughing with another trader. ‘We really appreciate the support,’ he says, a new light in his eyes. The protestors speak over the loudspeaker of their plans to occupy the space. People volunteer to stay overnight along with the traders, while they push for their demands to be met. When I return at 10pm, groups of protestors sit chatting cross-legged on the floor, playing Vybz Kartel on a mini-speaker, and some traders stand together to the side. It’s good energy, festival-style, but with a touch of growing fatigue.
It doesn’t feel right that these Ridley Road traders essentially have to sleep on the street to protect their businesses, to suffer so much to receive the bare minimum. The next day, 1 April, the same security forces return, waiting for people to tire so that they can swoop in and shut it down. All this to guard a fraction of the assets of a multi-millionaire. The landlord has been sending intimidation emails via Rainbow Properties to local Green councillor Zoë Garbett – who has been on the frontlines for the traders’ justice – aiming to bully traders without any terms nor agreements made. (‘We are unable to progress with future plans given the illegal occupation that will have to be dealt with via lengthy legal proceedings before we can consider reopening the market. The Save Ridley Road campaign, together with other agitators who claim to be acting in the best interest of traders are, in fact, doing the exact opposite,’ Larochette Real Estate wrote.)
But it’s not just the muscle who return. More and more protestors have been arriving each day. In a group chat, over 100 locals mobilise to bring vegan and gluten-free food for all, sleeping bags, cushions, blankets. Mitchum deodorant and snacks. A sound system to play reggae, and microphones for traders and protestors to say their piece. People paint huge signs: ‘HANDS OFF OUR MARKET. We are one community.’
Most of these people were strangers tothe traders. But this is the point of a neighbourhood, and the beauty of local trade, where you can see and feel each others’ contributions and kindness, even when you haven’t formally met. It’s a reminder that the worst form of antisocial behaviour is that of the developers seeking to replace the love of thy neighbour with barren flats that are only home to corrupt money. You can’t share dal in an empty city. This is a London worth fighting for.
Editor’s note, with an update from the Save Ridley Road campaign.
Some traders along with the community peacefully resisted attempts by security to close the market on 31 March. The landlord has now cut the power, so the local community has been supplying power banks and generators. Traders now have weeks to prepare and finance a court case for their right to stay. A community occupation is helping them keep the space running.
A community fundraiser will allow traders to take their fate in their own hands, by defending their tenancy rights in court, and supporting and sustaining the community occupation. To donate, you can follow this link.
Credits
Amel Mukhtar is a freelance writer for Vittles, Vogue, 72 Magazine, Dazed, Crack Magazine and more.
All photographs courtesy of Save Ridley Road community.
Vittles Restaurants is edited by Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn. This article was sub-edited and fact-checked by Odhran O’Donoghue.
The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.