Published by Specola / Books, Francesco Ragazzi’s Broadway Market explores the excitement of 25 Broadway Market.
Every Saturday morning at 7:30, Jason comes to wash the window at Organico, an organic food shop on 25 Broadway Market.
Soaped brush after soaped brush, the glass reveals the growing buzz of the awakening market: the first stalls begin to open, vendors start setting up amid casual chatter, early morning customers flow in—some just observing, others queuing to snap up the freshest products, while a few, trying clothes on, fight for a slice of the only mirror standing at the centre of this orchestrated chaos. Regular loners, curious couples, neighbour families—the spectacle of Broadway Market gradually unfolds in front of the shop. Between 2015 and 2016, Francesco Ragazzi shot over fifty thousand images through the window of the grocery shop where he worked, nestled inside Broadway Market.
At times, he triggered the shutter himself; at others, he left the camera to its own casuality, shooting at regular intervals, always leaning in the same position on the oil shelf. Through its unique design—modular and interactive—and a thoughtful edit from this enormous pool of pictures, Broadway Market offers the viewer a glimpse into the stream of life pullulating every day in front of the shop’s window, paying tribute to the Market as one of East London’s pillars and most striking metaphors: a key space mirroring the mythical area’s inner soul and evolutions over the years.
With nostalgic hints and fragments of memory, in one of the texts accompanying the book, artist Tom Hunter traces the profound changes and inexorable gentrification of the Broadway Market area—from the 1980s, amid glorious squats in abandoned four-storey houses with large gardens and high ceilings, wild techno nights in old pubs, cheap beer and no bouncers—to today, when, despite the radical change in landscape, a Saturday walk down the Market still brings the joy of running into long-time friends: Uncool John at his own stand selling paintings of Hackney, old and new, Conor and his books at Donlon, Barley in Fabrications, recycling waste materials into beautiful garments, and so on.
Broadway Market is still alive and kicking, Hunter claims; it’s a unique place where countless people have found community and a real sense of belonging, throughout the area’s constant transformations. The Market, with its histrionic character, reflects the magic everydayness of life in East London—and thanks to Ragazzi’s quiet act of observing this tireless hive through the organic shop’s window, the book captures the beauty hidden in the small, singular details that make Broadway Market what it is: a place where seemingly incompatible lives—locals and wanderers, old-timers and newcomers—come together in one special, ever-shifting social fabric.
This is a dream of a dream of London, writes cultural geographer Iain Sinclair in the book’s introduction. And he’s right: Broadway Market stands as one of the most compelling examples of the cultural exchange and interweaving that emerge from London—the very foundation on which the city builds its promises. A tangible utopia of community and hybridisation. A home to many, and a rite of passage for others. The market, in its transience, is a quiet testament to what East London is, has been—and, somehow, will be. As writer and curator Devjani Saltzman suggests in her contribution to the book, all behind the window frame, we watch in our own silence, imagining the lives of the countless strangers passing by, inebriated by the smell of coffee and freshly baked focaccia.
Book Design by Massimo Melloni
Text by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Tom Hunter, Devjani Saltzman, Iain Sinclair.
Published by Specola / books
Book Launch Wed October 22 nd at Clair de Rouen, London.
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