Please scroll down the page for a timeline of the history of Old Spitalfields Market. We’ve also compiled background information into the names behind the eight gates leading into Old Spitalfields Market

AD 300/ 400        
The site of a Roman cemetery.

1197
‘The priory of St. Mary of the Spittle’, a medieval hospital, is founded: the first part of the name ‘Spitalfields’ derives from the word ‘hospital’, which to the medieval mind was understood as ‘hospitality’, a place of rest as well as medicine.

1666
Following the Great Fire of London, thousands of displaced people camp on the Spital Fields.

1669
Samuel Pepys visits the Old Artillery-ground at Spitalfields, “where I never was before, but now by Captain Deane’s invitation did go to see his new gun tried, this being the place where the officers of the Ordnance do try all their great guns.”

1682
Charles II grants a Letters Patent to a silk thrower by the name of John Balch, allowing a market for flesh, fowl and roots in Spitalfields, an area known as a ‘stronghold of Noncomformity’

Large numbers of Huguenots (French and Flemish Protestants) fleeing religious persecution settle in the area, bringing with them a new wave of skills. Their silk-making expertise will make ‘Spitalfields Silk’ into a world-famous export – and they also invent Oxtail soup.

1880s
Mass Jewish settlement in Spitalfields combines with the invention of the sewing machine to launch the mechanized clothing trade – and introduces bagels to the area.

1875
Robert Horner, a former market porter, purchases at public auction the lease for the market.

1887
The ‘Horner Buildings’ are officially finished.

1888
Charles Roberts Ashbee, a founder of the Arts and Craft movement, opens his Guild and School of Handicraft at Toynbee Hall on Commercial Street, across the road from Spitalfields Market

1900s
A new wave of mass settlement brings Maltese, Irish, Scots, West Indian, Somalian and Bangladeshi communities to the area.

1940s
Spitalfields fruit and veg traders club together and buy a Spitfire fighter plane to aid the war effort. They name it ‘Fruitaition’.

1991
The fruit and veg market moves to Temple Hill, Leyton in East London where it now occupies a purpose-built 31 acre site. “Old Spitalfields Market” takes its current form.

1999
Archaeologists discover the remains of a wealthy young pagan woman from Roman times in a decorated sarcophagus

2005
The new Spitalfields development at Crispin Place and Bishops Square opens next door to Old Spitalfields Market. Old Spitalfields Market wins the Time Out award for ‘Best London Market’ two years running.

2008
Restoration work, which will preserve the Horner Buildings for another generation, is fully completed.

The Huguenots, or French Protestants, first began arriving in Spitalfields during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, towards the end of the sixteenth century. In 1685, King Louis XIV of France declared Protestantism to be illegal and the Huguenots flocked to Spitalfields in their thousands.

Local records mention Huguenot surgeons, merchants, bakers and jewellers, but the majority of the new immigrants were silk weavers. Local houses would display spools, the sign of the weavers, until the trade died out in the 1930s.

Many of the Huguenots lived in poverty, but some were prosperous and influential; when the Bank of England was founded in 1694, seven of the twenty-four investors and directors were from the Huguenot community. Today, street names such as Fournier Street and Fleur de Lis Street reflect the area’s French past, while the Huguenots’ energising precedent has been echoed by subsequent waves of immigration from all over the world.

For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Spitalfields was at the very centre of Britain’s silk industry. Many fortunes were woven from the local silk – and in 1840 so was Queen Victoria’s wedding dress.

Weaving was the principle trade of the local Huguenot population. Its legacy can still be seen in the windows of the weavers' lofts, built large to give workers as much light as possible.

In the early eighteenth century, designers such as Anna Garthwaite turned Spitalfields silk, with its intricate patterns of flowers and berries, into a byword for elegance. It is the mulberry leaf, via the digestive system of the silkworm, from which silk is made.

In the run-up to the Second World War, the local silk trade, which had been declining in the face of French competition, finally vanished. The area was now better known for its fruit and vegetable market

The writer, philosopher and early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft - one of the most original thinkers of her age - was born in Spitalfields in 1759. Her young father, a silk weaver, was the son of an affluent landlord, but gradually squandered his inheritance on a series of unwise farming ventures. Wollstonecraft left home – by then in Walworth, South London – at the age of 19.

In 1788, she came under the influence of the liberal publisher Joseph Johnson and began to move in progressive intellectual circles. During this period, she penned several major works, including a history of the French Revolution and most famously A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Published in 1792, it radically asserted that women were as intellectually able as men, proclaiming: “For man and woman, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same”.

Wollstonecraft died in 1797 from complications giving birth to her second daughter. The child, also named Mary, would go on to marry the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley – and write the novel Frankenstein

Jewish families first began settling in Spitalfields in the seventeenth century. In the 1880s, anti-semitic pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe triggered a major Jewish exodus, and thousands joined the existing communities in Spitalfields and Whitechapel.

Representing these districts was the Liberal MP Samuel Montagu, a well-liked philanthropist, leading banker, keen fly fisherman and devout Orthodox Jew. He was dedicated to the welfare of his new constituents, lobbying for their humane treatment and founding a number of shelters and working men's clubs specifically for their use.

He was chairman of the Spitalfields Benevolent Society, which was formed to help the area’s poorer inhabitants, and he founded the Federation of Synagogues. In 1907, Montagu was raised to the peerage and became the first recipient of the title Baron Swaythling.

The Jewish community thrived in Spitalfields for several decades before gradually moving towards the suburbs, a trend eventually accelerated by the heavy bombing of the East End during the Second World War

When Robert Horner first arrived in London in 1856, he found work as a Spitalfields Market porter, earning six shillings a week plus breakfasts. His enthusiasm for the potato trade eventually earned him a partnership in a vegetable business, and by 1875 he had acquired the means to purchase the lease for the whole market. By 1887 he had completely rebuilt and covered the site at a cost of £80,000.

The architect hired for the project was George Sherrin of Finsbury Square. The Royal Institute of British Architects said Sherrin was "a most earnest worker" and that "all his buildings bore evidence of his sincerity”. The stunning Horner Buildings that he created, influenced in their design by the Arts and Crafts movement, still house Old Spitalfields Market today.

When Sherrin died in 1909, an obituary in The Builder listed the market as one of his chief works and noted that "in all Mr Sherrin’s work there was the feeling of a true artist". Robert Horner, meanwhile, held the market lease until 1920, when the Corporation of London used compulsory powers to purchase it from him, albeit for a sizeable sum.

September 1940 saw the start of the Blitz. London was hit by bombing raids on an almost nightly basis and, because of its docks, the East End was a prime target.

Three months into the onslaught, the fruit and vegetable traders in Spitalfields did their bit for the defensive effort by buying a Spitfire fighter plane and donating it to the RAF. Named ‘Fruitation’ after the magazine of the National Federation of Fruit and Potato Traders, it was allocated to a squadron at Southend, then Hornchurch. This was Spitfire Mk. Vb W3311.

On 28th December 1940 the Ministry of Aircraft Production dispatched a letter of response: “Will you please convey to the tenants of the London Fruit and Vegetable Markets my warmest thanks for their generous gift. Their Spitfire will be the symbol of their defiance of the enemy. Against such a spirit he cannot prevail.”

September 1940 saw the start of the Blitz. London was hit by bombing raids on an almost nightly basis and, because of its docks, the East End was a prime target.

Three months into the onslaught, the fruit and vegetable traders in Spitalfields did their bit for the defensive effort by buying a Spitfire fighter plane and donating it to the RAF. Named ‘Fruitation’ after the magazine of the National Federation of Fruit and Potato Traders, it was allocated to a squadron at Southend, then Hornchurch. This was Spitfire Mk. Vb W3311.

On 28th December 1940 the Ministry of Aircraft Production dispatched a letter of response: “Will you please convey to the tenants of the London Fruit and Vegetable Markets my warmest thanks for their generous gift. Their Spitfire will be the symbol of their defiance of the enemy. Against such a spirit he cannot prevail.”

In the mid sixteenth century, the southern part of what is now Spitalfields came to be known as The Old Artillery Ground, and was used for the practice of “longebowes, crossebowes and handegonnes”.

In a diary entry of April 1669, Samuel Pepys describes a visit to witness the unveiling of a new gun, “which, from the shortness and bigness, they do call Punchinello”. Having arrived late and missed the demonstration, he persuaded a colonel to fire it once more, and was most impressed by its accuracy, range and lack of recoil.

The Old Artillery Ground is recalled in local street names such as Artillery Passage and Gun Street. In the 1680s, the guns stopped firing and the Crown began selling off the land to private developers.

Christopher Wren was commissioned to survey the site and he noted that a tender for a market could generate substantial profit. However, the City blocked this suggestion and instead a market charter was granted to a silk thrower named John Balch, in the nearby Spital Field.