Spitalfields Market — Where Commerce Meets Creativity

Spitalfields Market in London is a historic covered market where archaeologists in 1999 discovered a nearly 2,000-year-old Roman sarcophagus containing a wealthy woman dressed in Syrian gold and Chinese silk. King Charles I granted a trading license for the location in 1638, and by 1810 over 10,000 Huguenot silk looms operated nearby. Modern local landmarks include Kenny Hunter's three-and-a-half-metre goat sculpture installed after winning a 2010 prize.

London · from the walk “Walls That Talk: Shoreditch Street Art & Urban Creativity” · Generated

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Old Spitalfields Market, Brushfield Street, London E1 6AA

What ancient Roman discovery was made beneath Spitalfields Market in London in 1999?

Look up at this magnificent Victorian roof above you. You're standing inside one of London's most extraordinary creative crossroads... a place where art, commerce, and nearly four centuries of human ambition collide beneath a single canopy of iron and glass.

Trading began here in sixteen thirty-eight, when King Charles the First granted a licence for flesh, fowl, and roots to be sold on what was then called Spittle Fields — nothing but open pasture on the edge of the city. The name itself comes from Saint Mary Spital, a medieval priory and hospital founded here in eleven ninety-seven.

But here's what makes this ground truly extraordinary. In March nineteen ninety-nine, archaeologists digging right beneath where you're standing unearthed a Roman stone sarcophagus. Inside was a young woman, perfectly preserved, lying on a pillow of bay leaves, wrapped in an elaborate robe of Chinese silk decorated with gold thread from Syria. Researchers later determined her outfit was made from Chinese damask silk from Palmyra. A woman of astonishing wealth, buried nearly two Thousand years ago... right here, beneath a market selling vintage jackets and artisan coffee.

Now look beyond the market toward Fournier Street. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in sixteen eighty-five, Huguenot refugees fleeing France brought their silk weaving skills to Spitalfields. By eighteen ten, more than ten thousand silk looms operated around this market area. Those grand houses with their oversized attic windows? Those were designed to flood light onto the looms. Art and craft have been in this neighbourhood's Dna for centuries.

And the artistic tradition never left! Among the many well-known artists living in Spitalfields are Gilbert and George, Tracey Emin, and Stuart Brisley. Gilbert and George bought their building on Fournier Street in nineteen seventy-three and were the First to restore a house on that street — when the whole area was still crumbling factories. In twenty twenty-three, they opened the Gilbert and George Centre on Heneage Street, just a stone's throw from here.

And do you see that sculpture of a goat perched on packing crates nearby? Artist Kenny Hunter said at its unveiling: "Goats are associated with non-conformity and being independently-minded. That is also true of London, and never more so than in Spitalfields." That three-and-a-half-metre sculpture won the Spitalfields Sculpture Prize in twenty ten — a perfect symbol for this defiant, creative corner of East London.

From Roman burial ground to Huguenot silk quarter... from Victorian fruit market to the beating heart of contemporary East London art. This is Spitalfields. Always changing. Always creating.

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