eastlondonhistory.com

Visiting tourists looking for the East End’s most famous market could be forgiven for being confused.
In fact, you will sometimes see them outside Aldgate East station, or at the foot of Middlesex Street, scratching their heads as they pore over their A to Zs.
Because, of course, there is no such street as Petticoat Lane – and nor has their been for around 170 years.
Hog’s Lane
Back in medieval times, Middlesex Street, the hub of the modern-day Lane, was a pleasant, tree-lined country road called Hog’s Lane – probably because it was used as a path to drive pigs from the nearby fields to market.
As early as 1590, its rural nature was changing, and Hog’s Lane meandered through a residential suburb of tidy country cottages, nestling outside the City walls.
And only a few years later, in 1608, it had changed again, to a commercial district. A map of the time shows the Lane
was now being referred to as ‘Peticote Lane’, named after the used garment vendors who plied their trade there.
It was still considered a fashionable address in the country, and during the reign of James I, the Spaniards who came to the English court settled here.
But like so much of London, Petticoat Lane was altered forever by the Great Plague of 1665. The rich fled the dangers of London, and property prices plummeted. As so often in Spitalfields, a new wave of immigrants replaced the old. This time it was Huguenot and Jewish weavers, carrying on the tradition of garment workers in the area.
It’s astonishing to think that this thread of tradition is unbroken – though the faces, clothes, names and nationalities of immigrants have changed – more than 300 years later.

By the 1750s, Petticoat Lane was not only a centre of manufacturing clothes, it had become a garment market, too. The well-to-do would trip out of the City on a Sunday to purchase the wares at the Lane.
It was 1830 when Petticoat Lane was dignified with the new name of Middlesex Street. Amazing, too, that though the name was taken off official maps so long ago, it is still how everyone knows the market.
By now, the Lane was not only the place to buy new and second-hand clothes, it was a centre for all kinds of secondhand goods, and the nearby markets of Brick Lane and Club Row made Spitalfields the marketplace of all London.
Sunday sins
Middlesex Street was widened following demolitions in 1900, giving the traders even more room to set up their stalls. But the moralities of the time frowned on Sunday trading, and there were numerous attempts to halt the famous Petticoat Lane Sunday market.
Some of these were none too subtle – with buses and fire engines being driven through the crowds in an attempt to break things up.
In 1936, the authorities bowed to the inevitable, and the Lane became protected by an Act of Parliament.
Brick Lane may have become increasingly gentrified these days, and Club Row can no longer sell the caged birds that made it famous from the Huguenot times right through to the 1980s. But Petticoat Lane remains essentially unchanged, with an exuberance and life that comes from several hundred years of the rag trade plying its business on East End streets. To tourists it may turn out to be ‘Middlesex Street’, but to East Enders it will always just be The Lane.

The history of the East End is inextricably tied up with its markets. Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Petticoat Lane, Roman Road – sometimes it seems as much trading is done in the streets themselves as in the shops.
But ironically, one of the most venerable markets in Tower Hamlets, with a 900-year history, has only had its home in the borough for the last 18 years. When the Billingsgate Market bell rang to announce the commencement of trading on January 19, 1982, it marked just the latest stop in the market’s long and troubled history.
Falling foul
In the Middle Ages, London had two big fish markets. Queenhithe stood in Upper Thames Street, just west of the Tower of London, and Billingsgate on the river in Lower Thames Street.
Both were infamous for their foul language as well as the foul smell – hence the
raucous reputation of the fishwives. At first, Queenhithe was more important, but gradually Billingsgate, with its proximity to the water and ability to deal with the bigger fishing vessels, took over.
The first toll regulations for Billingsgate were drawn up in 1016 and, by the 13th century, corn, malt and salt were being landed, as well as fish.
By the reign of Elizabeth I, ‘victuals and fruit’ were on sale. And when an Act of Parliament was passed in 1698 to break the monopoly of the small group of fishmongers who ran the market, Billingsgate became
‘a free and open market for all sorts of fish’.
A mess…
Space had always been a problem in the cramped Lower Thames Street site, but even the opening of Hungerford Market in competition in 1749 couldn’t break Billingsgate’s dominance. The site was, in truth, a mess. Until 1850 it consisted of a huddle of scruffy sheds on the open space of
the dock.
An observer at the time described the market as ‘dotted with low booths and sheds, with a range of wooden houses with a piazza in front on the west, which served the salesmen and fishmongers as
shelters, and for the purpose of carrying on their trade’.

The porters would scurry to and fro wearing their ‘bobbing hats’, leather helmets which they used to convey the fish from wholesaler to retailer, and said to have been
modelled on the helmets worn by Henry V’s bowmen at Agincourt. A ‘bob’ or shilling was the price of the carriage.
In a bid to increase the
market’s capacity, JB Bunning rebuilt Billingsgate, but it was quickly deemed inadequate and, in 1874, Corporation of London architect Sir Horace Jones designed the mock French edifice seen in Lower Thames Street to this day.
Even then, the market failed to live up to demands and in 1883 it was written that the ‘deficiencies of Billingsgate and its surrounds are a great scandal to London’. Running a bustling market in the increasingly crowded financial centre of the City of London was becoming ever more difficult.
Derelict island
It took another 90 years for the Corporation of London to do something about it though, when the freemen decided to relocate to the increasingly derelict Isle of Dogs. As the docks closed down there was space to spare, and the island was far more accessible to
container ships and the huge trucks which converge on Billingsgate from around the UK and Europe.
A new beginning
The old site closed on January 16, 1982. The bobbing hats were history, being replaced with less picturesque forklift trucks. About the only thing that was taken to the island was the bell – which rang three days later to commence a new era of dealing.
At last, after 900 years, on a 13.5 acre site built around a renovated warehouse on the West India Docks, Billingsgate had the room it needed.