Old Spitalfields Market & the Hospital Fields

Why is it significant?

Walk in under the iron and glass roof of Old Spitalfields Market and let the place wash over you: stalls, food counters, the smell of coffee and frying onions, people drifting from one table of vintage clothes to the next. Now say the name slowly. Spital fields... the fields of the hospital.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk in under the iron and glass roof of Old Spitalfields Market and let the place wash over you: stalls, food counters, the smell of coffee and frying onions, people drifting from one table of vintage clothes to the next. Now say the name slowly. Spital fields... the fields of the hospital.

In 1197, a Londoner called Walter Brunus and his wife Rosia founded a priory and hospital here, St Mary Spital, just outside the city walls. For more than three hundred years it cared for the sick and the poor, until Henry VIII closed it in the 1530s. The open land around it then became the place where the City put what it did not want inside its walls: artillery practice, which is why you just passed Artillery Lane... and the dead.

When the market area was redeveloped from the 1990s, archaeologists uncovered the hospital's cemetery, with around ten thousand burials. Among them were great pits full of bodies from the thirteenth century. For years people assumed it was plague, but the dates point to an earlier disaster: a terrible famine around 1258, which may have followed a colossal volcanic eruption on the island of Lombok, on the far side of the world. Just to the south, in Bishops Square, you can still look down through a glass floor into the medieval charnel house, where bones were stacked once the graves were full.

The market itself began with a royal charter from Charles II in 1682. The Huguenot weavers who poured into the area after 1685 bought their bread and greens here, and over the next two centuries it grew into one of London's great wholesale fruit and vegetable markets. The Victorian hall was built in the 1880s and 1890s by Robert Horner, a former market porter who had bought the lease, and the square outside still carries his name. Porters worked here through the night until 1991, when the wholesale trade moved out to Leyton.

The fight over what should replace it was long and bitter, and part of the old hall was lost to office towers. But the market survived, and so did its noise. Leave by the east side now, cross Commercial Street, and walk up Hanbury Street to Brick Lane, where a tall brewery chimney rises above the rooftops.