Leather Lane Market

Leather Lane Market is an outdoor street market in the Holborn area of the London Borough of Camden. Taking place on Leather Lane, it is the oldest street market in Camden. Licences to trade are issued by Camden London Borough Council.

Hatton Garden was being developed into a residential area just prior to the Great Fire of London. The undeveloped areas of Hatton Garden were used as a refuge for Londoners escaping destruction of much of the city. It seems likely that street trading established itself on Leather Lane at this time to cater to the needs of those refugees and to provide employment for the traders who had lost their normal pitches.

Just to the west of Leather Lane, a private open-air butchers market, Brooke's Market was established in at least 1685. In the late eighteenth century many of the lower floors of houses had been converted into shops taverns and coffee shops.

Henry Mayhew records there being 150 stalls in 1851. Most working people were paid each week on Saturday and Saturday night/Sunday morning were the busiest trading time for markets. From his, the earliest examinations of street markets, food that could be consumed on the spot formed an important part of their offer with fried fish, pies, and (from the 1830s) baked potatoes feeding factory and office workers.

Mayhew describes a short-lived attempt by some of the shopkeepers to have the street traders removed that took place shortly before his survey:

“Leather-lane,” I was told, “looked like a desert compared to what it was. People that had lived there for years hardly knew their own street and those that had complained might twiddle their thumbs in their shops for want of something better to do.”

— Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor

After a fortnight, other traders and the local residents succeeded in having the market traders reinstated. The, brief, closure of Leather Lane inspired a contemporary ballad: