I want to be clear from the outset that I love Victoria Park Market. I go every Sunday when I’m in London, I’ve been going for the better part of eight years, and it has become one of those fixed points in my week that I’d miss disproportionately if it disappeared. I say this because what follows is going to sound, at moments, like the observations of a man who has complicated feelings about the place. Both things are true. Love and mild exasperation are not mutually exclusive. If anything, in my experience, they’re almost always found together.
The market sets up along the eastern edge of the park from around ten o’clock on Sunday mornings. By half past, it is in full swing, which means it is extremely busy, slightly chaotic, and smells absolutely incredible – coffee and frying onions and something from the Korean barbecue stall that has, on more than one occasion, made me stop walking and just stand there for a moment in a state of involuntary gratitude. My girlfriend has a theory that the entire market is engineered at a neurological level to extract money from people who’ve had a glass of wine the night before, and I think she’s probably right. It works on me every single week.
What follows is a field guide. Consider it a public service.
The Coffee Queue, and What It Reveals About All of Us
The centrepiece of any serious London market in 2025 is its coffee operation, and Victoria Park’s does not disappoint. There are, at last count, three separate coffee stalls within what I can only describe as an unnecessarily short distance of each other, all of them doing brisk business, all of them with queues that suggest east London runs entirely on single-origin flat whites and the collective pretence that waiting fifteen minutes for a coffee in the open air is a lifestyle choice rather than a mild inconvenience.
I queue too. Every week. I have done this long enough to have formed a precise personal taxonomy of the people around me in the queue.
There is, first, the Performatively Recovered. This is the person who is unambiguously still experiencing the aftereffects of Saturday night but has assembled an outfit that says otherwise – the pristine activewear, the reusable cup already in hand, the slightly unfocused gaze of someone willing themselves into wellness through sheer expenditure. They always order something with oat milk. They tip.
Then there is the Genuinely Evangelical, who arrived early, who has already done a run around the park, and who is now having what appears to be a passionate conversation with the barista about altitude and processing methods. This person is perfectly happy. I try not to resent them.
And then there is me, slightly underdressed, clutching my four pounds twenty, wanting a coffee and a quiet moment before the rest of the market begins. I always get the flat white. I always think it’s worth it. This is my Sunday.
The Cast of Characters, Every Week Without Fail
A market like this is only partly about the shopping. Mostly, if you’re being honest, it’s about the people, and Victoria Park on a Sunday has a cast that would comfortably sustain a long-running television series.
There are the Dog People, who form an almost separate community within the market and operate by a different set of social rules. The Dog People make eye contact freely – not with each other, with each other’s dogs – and greet animals by name while remaining in complete ignorance of their owners. I have been attending this market for eight years. There is a woman with a large, profoundly relaxed greyhound who I see almost every Sunday. I could not tell you one thing about her beyond the dog’s name, which I know because I’ve heard it called twenty times. The dog’s name is Gerald. Gerald is magnificent.
There are also the Serious Shoppers, who arrive with a canvas bag that actually gets used and a mental list and a purposeful walk. These are people who have their Sunday down to a system. They go to the same stalls in the same order. They know the stall holders. They are, I think, the most genuinely contented people at the market, because they’ve stripped away the performance of it and just made it part of how they live. I respect this deeply and have never once managed it myself.
And then there are the Tourists – not foreign tourists, necessarily, but the people who’ve come from Stoke Newington or Islington or, God help them, Canary Wharf, because they’ve heard about the market and want to have the experience of it. They move differently. They’re slightly more dressed up. They photograph their food before eating it – full overhead shot, repositioned cup for composition – and you can see in their faces the entire experience of deciding whether to post this now or save it for a better caption later. I was new once. I try to remember this.
What People Are Actually Eating
The food offer at Victoria Park Market is, in all seriousness, extraordinary. This is the one area where I will issue no qualifications and ask for none in return. Whatever you think about the pricing or the demographic or the distance between this and what the market might have looked like twenty years ago, the food is genuinely brilliant, and the range of it – across maybe thirty or forty metres of stalls on a good Sunday – is the kind of thing that makes you feel briefly grateful to live where you live.
The Korean barbecue I mentioned at the start is the flagship, as far as I’m concerned. There are also Eritrean stews, a Sri Lankan short eats stall that always has a queue it entirely deserves, a Jamaican jerk operation whose proprietor I will only describe as a man who has found his purpose, and – newer this year – a small Basque pintxos setup that seems to be doing complicated things with anchovies to considerable public approval.
There is also, inevitably, a crêpe stall, because every market in London is required by some unwritten law to have a crêpe stall. Victoria Park’s is fine. I’ve never understood the queue it attracts given everything else available, but then I’ve never fully understood the appeal of a crêpe when there’s jerk chicken twelve feet away. That’s a personal position. I hold it firmly.
The Produce Stalls and the Theatre of Ethical Consumption
Here is where I must be careful, because I am about to gently make fun of something I genuinely participate in.
The produce section of the market runs a kind of theatre of conscious purchasing that I find both slightly absurd and personally irresistible. There are organic vegetables presented as though they are sculpture – knobbly, honest, imperfect in ways that have been carefully selected to signal authenticity. There is sourdough bread from a bakery whose background story is summarised on a small chalkboard and involves, as it almost always does, someone leaving a career in finance. There are eggs from hens whose quality of life has been explained to me in more detail than the quality of life of most people I know.
All of this costs considerably more than the equivalent at the supermarket. I buy it anyway. I buy it every week. The sourdough is genuinely better – I’ve made my peace with the markup – and there is something about buying a vegetable from a person who grew it that satisfies something in me I can’t entirely explain. Maybe it’s the transaction. Maybe it’s the illusion of connection in a city that doesn’t always make connection easy. Maybe I’ve just been here long enough to get got by the chalkboard backstory.
The natural wine stall does not require any additional commentary. It exists. People use it. Some of them are me.
What a Sunday Morning Here Actually Means
Strip away the irony and the field-guide framing and what you’re left with is this: Victoria Park Market is one of my favourite places in London, and Sunday morning there is one of my favourite times of the week.
It’s a place where the city slows down to a pace that feels human. Where the agenda is simply to eat something good and stand in some sunshine and let the week that’s coming recede for an hour or two. I see the same people every week – Gerald the greyhound, the evangelical runner, the couple with the Bugaboo who’ve been coming since their baby was born and now let the toddler carry their own small paper bag of pastries with tremendous seriousness. These people are not my friends exactly. But they are part of the texture of my Sunday, and therefore part of the texture of my life.
Hackney has changed enormously in the time I’ve lived here. The market is, in many ways, a product of that change – it could not exist in the neighbourhood as it was twenty years ago, and there are complicated feelings available about what that means. I’ve had some of those feelings in other posts.
On a Sunday morning in the park, though, I find I can set them down for a bit.
The coffee’s good. Gerald is usually there. That’s enough.
