The antidote to Battersea Power Station's new shopping mall is less than ten minutes walk away in another famous building. It too is enormous, engaging and overcrowded, but also cheap, edgy and occasionally dubious. It's Nine ElmsSunday Market, and it's London's largest.
You'll find it at, or more accurately around, New Covent Garden Market. This is the historic fruit, vegetable and flower wholesale market which relocated here in 1974 when Nine Elms was down at heel with cheap and plentiful land. The architects left plenty of room for parking around the two long sheds, so it's here that the market sets up every Sunday morning while all the usual traders take the day off. And at 8am the swarms arrive.
Both stations on the new Northern line extension provide very good access, or you can walk in from Vauxhall, Wandsworth Road or Battersea Park Road. Just look for the stream of punters heading in or, if it's later in the day, heading out laden with tools, toys, duvets and/or multipacks of toilet roll. Expect most people coming the other way to be carrying something in a white or blue plastic bag, because single-use carrier bags are still alive and well at Nine Elms Sunday Market.
It's like a jumped-up car boot sale but with hundreds of regular traders and a firm security presence at each entrance. If you remember Dagenham Sunday Market it's on the same scale but less 'exiled Cockney' and a lot more worldly wise. All the staples are here from fashion to household goods and footwear to accessories. Workwear is commonplace, suggesting this is where tradesmen head to pick up their toolbelt, boots and Dewalt toolbox before heading off to the building site on Monday morning. Need a suitcase or sunglasses, a bottle of bleach, a pack of knickers or a new coat? There's a good chance Nine Elms Sunday Market has it on the cheap.
Of course it might not be the legitimate object. I doubt those were genuine M&S jumpers for £12, or that was really an Adidas top, or that any of the fragrances in that bagged bundle were what they said on the bottle. How that rack of kids' size t-shirts with 'Tesco' embroidered on the chest came to be on sale for £1 each is a question best not asked. But if you don't mind buying a boxed electric massager from a brand you've never heard of before, or if you're OK that your new rucksack might fall apart quicker than usual, or if your kid just wants an electric robot toy unaligned to any global franchise, come on down.
The 400-or-so stalls encircle one of the market's huge hangars and extend up additional service roads, so you can do a big elongated loop while deciding what to buy. Immediately behind are the weekday bases of traders like Bevington Salads Ltd, Mushroom Man and T&L Food Importers, and on the other side dozens and dozens of white (likely refrigerated) vans. Head into the corners of the site and it does get a lot more car boot sale, with unwanted treasures spread out across tables and blankets. Again these aren't collectibles or homely bric a brac, they're practical items like second hand electricals, emptied kitchen cupboards or something to keep the kids quiet.
The clientele is diverse and on the lookout for a bargain. English is not the most common language being spoken, you'll hear Middle Eastern, Asian and especially Eastern European tongues as you push through the shoppers. It's quite a male environment, occasionally assertively so but nothing that'd put the regulars off. A lot of the men are in baseball caps and black unbranded jackets or grey hoodies, possibly bought right here, and the women in something fleecy, clingy or padded. They rifle through goods on tables, they pore over stacks of boxes and if they have any sense they haggle, because more than likely that'll work. There's nothing middle class about Nine Elms Sunday Market.
The smell of greasy grilled meat is in the air, but only from a few stalls because here food is for sustenance, not lightly grazing. Grab a cheesy burger and a can of Fanta, rip off a couple of sheets of kitchen roll and sit down at a table alongside bottles of squeezy ketchup and squirty mayo. Other nutritional options include undercooked chips, Chinese rice and full-on shawarma, while the longest queues by far are for Carpathina, the Romanian grill. Nobody's selling artfully bottled preserves or overpriced sourdough as you might find at farmers markets elsewhere in the capital - if it isn't value for money it isn't here.
Look up and the privileged towers of Nine Elms loom down, indeed there are plans to squeeze more luxury flats onto a remodelled market site which'll likely mean dispersing this weekly grassroots bazaar. In the meantime its existence is a useful reminder that, even with ostentatious wealth on show on the other side of the railway, there are many layers to London and here at Nine Elms the disconnect runs deep.
