ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses traditional retail markets in London as spaces where traders and citizens mobilise around wider urban and political issues. It provides understanding of gentrification and anti-gentrification beyond residential struggles to incorporate what can be interpreted as 'retail gentrification'. Public markets, like housing, have become a frontier for gentrification. If the literature on retail gentrification is still limited, research and analysis on processes resisting this gentrification is even scarcer and scattered across various areas. The chapter focuses on three inner London markets and campaigns to protect them; Queen's Market, Seven Sisters Market and Shepherd's Bush Market. The three market campaigns are struggling against abandonment and/or disinvestment by managers and owners. The more traditional markets, mostly run by local authorities, seem to do less well and these are also more likely to be located in deprived communities. To explain the decline of the traditional London market, reports highlight changing consumption patterns but also lack of investment by local authorities.
