Four apples …. six bin liners …. and a pot of prawns ….. Woolwich 46 years ago

I like street markets.

It’s that mix of bargains, noise, and banter which make them a a place I keep going back to.

And over the years I have known plenty, from the formal laid out market stalls in Ashton-Under-Lyne, to the run down and edgy Grey Mare Lane Market which operated across the road to where we lived and the ever popular Bury Market.

But none really compares to the one at Woolwich which once sold all you could want and heaps more that you didn’t but were so cheap you ended up buying.

Which might include a set of plates, a slab of Angel cake, and that gawdy glow in the dark statue of Big Ben.

Added to that there was the buzz of the place, made all that more interesting as stalls, people and traders coexisted with passing buses negotiating in the narrow space left between barrows offering piles of fruit, Kitchen stuff and cheap imports from the other side of the world.

At which point some will mutter it ain’t the same anymore, extending their nostalgic reflection to a rant on how Woolwich has changed and changed for the worse.

Now I can’t really comment as the last time I was there was 1979, but it is a truism that places change, and I bet the Woolwich of 1890 might have seemed a tad more mucky, diverse, and risky than that of 1968.

Leaving me just to admit that the story is just a vehicle to show off three pictures I took back at the end of the 70s.

They are not the best, and were originally colour slides which have sat in the cellar for four decades before being brought out and digitized recently.

Still they are a record of how we lived.

Location; Woolwich

Pictures; Woolwich, 1979 from the collection of Andrew Simpson