Petticoat Lane: The Market on the Border

Why is it significant?

Walk into Middlesex Street and you are walking along a frontier. One side of the road belongs to the City of London, the square mile of banks and insurers, and the other to the borough of Tower Hamlets, the old East End. For centuries this narrow street has been where the two worlds came to haggle.

Key Facts

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Walk into Middlesex Street and you are walking along a frontier. One side of the road belongs to the City of London, the square mile of banks and insurers, and the other to the borough of Tower Hamlets, the old East End. For centuries this narrow street has been where the two worlds came to haggle.

Its real name, for most Londoners, is Petticoat Lane. Back in the seventeenth century it was a lane of old-clothes dealers, and the French Huguenots who settled nearby sold lace and petticoats here. The Victorians found the name a bit too saucy, and in the 1830s it was officially renamed Middlesex Street, after the county boundary. Nobody paid the slightest attention. The old joke says the traders here were so quick they could steal your petticoat at one end of the lane and sell it back to you at the other.

In the nineteenth century this became the great market of the Jewish East End. From the 1880s onwards, tens of thousands of Jewish families arrived from Poland and the Russian Empire, many with nothing but a bundle and an address scribbled on paper, and plenty of them began with a barrow and a few bolts of cloth. Because Jewish traders rested on Saturday, the Sabbath, the big market day became Sunday morning... which scandalised Victorian churchgoers, and made this one of the very few places in London where you could go shopping on a Sunday.

Imagine the noise. Stallholders shouting prices in English and Yiddish, the smell of pickled herring and fried fish, salesmen who could sell a whole set of crockery by juggling it over the crowd's heads. Behind the stalls, in cramped back rooms and attics all around, tailors stitched coats and trousers for long hours and low pay, in what the Victorians called the sweating system. The East End rag trade, with all its energy and all its misery, grew out of these pavements.

Today the faces have changed again, and the stalls sell leather jackets, saris, phone cases and suitcases, but the ritual is the same: cheap goods, fast talk and a crowd. Keep walking north to the top of the street, then follow the narrow lanes north-east, past Artillery Lane, towards a huge Victorian market hall built on the fields of a medieval hospital.