Surrey Street Market

Urban scent upon urban scent, the foreground of relentless market vendor verbal batterings, but relax for what a fantastic place you have found yourself in. Non-other than Surrey Street Market.

In what could only be roughly a 100m stretch of road in Central Croydon we find this wonderful market. Vibrant by day selling everything from sweet potatoes to knock-off football shirts, to an urban skeleton of a market at night with not a sign of ever existing at all. Filtering perpendicular to Church St and what essentially is the primary drinking holes of south Croydon, the market is an overwhelming example of successful social and architectural environments. People are noticeably happier here to talk to you about anything and everything and you can barely find a moment when the vendors themselves are not handing out the banter to each other or changing up a tenner. It is so sad to see this sort of human exchange gradually fading away before my very eyes throughout the rest of Croydon, the act of discussing the weekends football or cheekily trying to convince the vendor for one more banana in your bowl-for-a-pound dissipating. I dare anyone to try a perk up an interesting conversation in one of the many power house shops on the high street, it just doesn't amount to anything real, the goal is make money in those places, they are damn good at it and it does not involve speaking to you.

My favorite activity is to simply walk through the market to reach the bus stop at the bottom of Church St with no plan of buying, just observing and absorbing the market environment, I hardly have to emphasis the architectural tiredness of the normal high street in comparison. In plan and section the street is an exceptional piece of organic market layout, the permanent shops which line either side of the road provide solidity whilst the diurnal market stalls provide a transparency which one must experience, to say they are as if weaved yet anarchic is to only provide a descriptive foundation. I advise anyone not to be discouraged by the crammed street-scape and walk Surrey Street Market more frequently, you will not regret or forget it and you might even walk away with fresh food for dinner and a beer in your belly.

tW

Bring a Bottle

So we begin. and where better to begin than with a small fragment of Croydon that no longer exists, except in photographs and hazy wine memories.

As I hope will become evident as this blog unfolds and I become better at being an architectural spy, Croydon is more like a brick house than a concrete one and by that I mean it should be considered by its many parts and not as one big slab. At least at this scale you can get a greater sense of the many faces and facades that allow Croydon to function as a fascinating multi-cultural town in South London.

The Wine Vaults was by all accounts a cosy cellaresque drinking hole sandwiched rather uncomfortably in the belly of M&S on the west end of Croydon high street. I never had the pleasure of visiting the Wine Vaults myself but heard many a good review of the place and how underrated and unnoticed it had become. The Vault has closed now, not long after I took this photo around a year ago, subtracting from Croydon another invaluable independent business with the void left behind undoubtedly destined to become yet another storage room for the all consuming M&S machine. The worrying issue for the urban environment is this decrease in smaller businesses, for when large busnisses and their respective architectures meet ugly things occur as companies battle for attention and flex their muscle. Although we do not always notice these smaller businesses they are much more personal on a social level and fill the urban voids wonderfully with their unique aesthetics. We need these small hideaways and I can assure anyone that Croydon would be an incredibly uniform looking place without them, and besides would it not have been amazing to have casually had a large glass of red amongst the vaults only to then surface like a boozy caterpillar in the middle of a giant advertising salad. I certainly would have loved it!


tW