From Covent Garden to Boxpark, Londoners have been reinventing the market form pretty much since people began gathering to exchange goods and gossip. Today, the ancient and ever-evolving ecosystem of markets is proving to be a savior of retail and a revitalizer of restaurants, giving Londoners and visitors new ways to be together that go far beyond the transactional.

In London, the future of retail is very much its past. Not the recent past of shuttered high streets and desolate malls. No, the future looks more like retail’s centuries-ago past—the market.

The appeal of the marketplace has traversed time and space: the sensory assault of the flavors, colors and perfumes of a tumble of goods, foods and opportunities never gets old.

The city’s Covent Garden has been making it fresh since the mid-1600s.

The urgency and immediacy created by vendors, the temporary nature of the whole affair, continues to compel. (Who can resist, for instance, the siren call of a barrow boy—“Everthin’ a fiver”—at the Columbia Road Shops and Flower Market, established in the early 1860s.)

The market is forever about wading into a hubbub of humans—what the French would call a bain de foule, literally, a crowd bath—a sublime mingling and connection. At Borough Market, people have been wandering with their fellows for a thousand years; today, you’ll meander through superlative food stalls (traditional Cumbrian pork pie, anyone?) and sign up for the four-and-a-half-hour Gin Journey Soho, “a run through the neighborhood’s secret drinking dens and stunning gin spots.”

To be sure, the nature of goods has changed. No one truly needs anything from today’s markets, so while there’s plenty to purchase, markets are also perfectly crafted third places—neither work nor home—in which to demonstrate the art and mastery of conspicuous leisure, of imbibing and appreciating.

Londoners are brilliant at this: everywhere in the city they show their skill at standing around comfortably at all hours of the day and night, sipping pints and filling sidewalks with their conversation and their amiable selves, wandering between the communities of inside and outside, pub and street, winter and summer.

At Leadenhall Market, they’ve been at it since the 14th century.

Another ingredient in the market mix: Londoners are very good at devising ways to gobble down animals and fish—from nose to tail—with a fearless curiosity that has made them skilled adopters of the strange and wonderful street food of every nation as their own. Today, street food is a staple of every market from Spitalfields to Giant Robot in Canary Wharf. Indeed, so important is great street food to the health of modern markets that a company called Kerb offers courses to aspiring vendors, mentoring, nurturing and giving them a leg up in the dog-eat-dog business. The British Street Food Awards, run by Street Feast, is a hugely competitive and popular contest of national prides, as manifested by 2019 entries like Malaysian Fried Chicken Roti, Northern Thai Hot Dog, Posh Poutine, Raw Beef Bibimbap, and something called A Waffle a Day Keeps the Doctor Away, although the ingredients indicate otherwise.

So while some sights and flavors are new, markets are still and forever about the people: a 21st-century entertainment experience inspired by 10th-century necessity—across the centuries, consistent ingredients have been citizenry, curiosity, food and drink. Markets forever offer the comfort of a familiar face and the anticipation of encountering an attractive unknown; they’ll always provide the opportunity for a moment’s warmth with another human, even if it’s just to sit beside a stranger at a picnic table to wolf down a Vietnamese sub, drink a few pints and watch the match. Of course the lettuce is fresh. But there’s karaoke, concerts and self-improvement, too.

Another key to Boxpark’s success was a go-with-the-flow approach. “Our business model is constantly evolving,” Wade told Propel Quarterly magazine. “So many people run things based on a business plan or a bunch of numbers. We run things based on feelings.”

So while Wade says he started out thinking he’d save independent street-style retailers, his feelings—and quite likely a bunch of numbers—quickly told him that the future was in independent food and drink, not independent fashion and stuff.

“So we just went with that,” he says. In 2017, he remodeled his top floor in Shoreditch into a street-food hall with 19 bars and restaurants, and built in some protection from the elements so that outdoor winter noshing wouldn’t be interrupted.

Boxpark Shoreditch has hung on to some 25 retailers, which offer a range of temptations, from Only the Blind luxury streetwear to Decorum—one of those lovely home and garden accessories shops with irresistible enticements of dubious usefulness—to an Ayurvedic hair care pop-up (one month only!), and many more.

But investment is critical—the placemaking-as-entertainment space is crowded with competitors ancient and new, and along with the city’s venerable and ever-vibrant marketplaces, new forms are emerging.

Seven Dials, an entirely indoor market in a former banana warehouse, is a food hall “for talented entrepreneurs” that also offers a hip private dining space. At Vinegar Yard, an eventually developable parking lot, there’s an urban garden, food stalls, vintage fashion and antiques and “even a bonkers installation by artist-in-residence Joe Rush, famous for his scrap-metal sculptures at Glasto,” according to an eager Time Out magazine report.

“Retail is entertainment, and if you’re not entertaining your customer, you won’t exist,” Wade says. Somewhere in the mists of time, far beneath the grounds of Covent Garden, a hawker is laughing.