Shepherds Bush
Market
Telling the story of one of London’s most colourful markets.
Editorial | Archival research | Digital
From Portobello Road to Petticoat Lane, everyone has a favourite London street market. A stone’s throw from Westfield, in the shadow of the Circle Line, Shepherds Bush Market is a hidden gem that’s been trading for over a century. Its story was crying out to be told.
Cover photography: Francesco Marchetti
I was commissioned by U+I to research and write the history of Shepherds Bush Market, from 1914 right up to the present day . I interviewed stall holders, rummaged through newspaper archives and unearthed rare books like The Street Markets of London by Mary Benedetta from 1936, which features photographs by the great Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy.
The result is a four-part story, featured on the market’s website and which, most importantly, received the stallholders’ seal of approval.
Here’s a little excerpt…
The 1960s may have been swinging on the King’s Road in Chelsea. In Shepherds Bush, where the Westway loomed over the Green and new concrete tower blocks shot up like hollyhocks in summer, things were still a little rough around the edges. Roger Daltrey, the lead singer of The Who, grew up just a few streets from the market and knew it well. When in 1967, The Who headlined the Monterey Pop Festival, he was wrapped in a “hippy shawl” according to the music press, which later turned out to be tasseled tablecloth he’d picked up in Shepherds Bush Market.
W12 was also the stomping ground of Steve Jones and Paul Cook, two wayward youths who went on to form the Sex Pistols in 1975. They’d both met at Christopher Wren School and would nip down to A. Cook’s Pie & Mash shop on their lunch breaks whenever they got the chance. Another of their favourite haunts was Stuarts, a Jewish tailor on Uxbridge Road, where the skinheads at the time used to get their tonic suits made for a princely £10. (Stuarts later became one of the country’s leading stockists of casual wear that spread like wildfire on the football terraces in the 1980s.)
The mods of the era could get their hands on the latest music at 179 where W.G. Records was still going strong (it was originally a gramophone repair store). For lovers of ska and reggae, the Musik City stall at 12a in the covered market was the place to be. The stall was part of a chain of Muzik City shops owned by Lee Gopthal, who set up Trojan Records and had a chain of record shops. For many years Webster Shrowder ran the stall, serving up the sweetest sounds straight out of Jamaica. He later went solo, renaming it Webster’s Record Shack.