Within urban fabric, every space holds memories which form a dialectic between the past, present and future. Space exists as a subjective experience, inhabited by bodies and materials, stitching together the human and non-human. Ridley Road Market, in Dalston, East London, contains a complex ecology of embedded histories. The street becomes a fixed stage for human events. The architecture of the market holds meaning, a collective memory, as explored by Rossi in The Architecture of the City.¹ The market has endured over time, amongst change it maintains a concept of permanence, a fixed point in the wider urban dynamic. This research explores the rituals of the street market, the city as theatre and the market as a monument. Seeks to prove that these rituals render the permanence of a monument.

In an ontological consideration of monuments, there is a tension being the state of lived experience and geographical fixation. Through occupation of the interstitial spaces and the peripheries, through the resistance to state violence, to fascism and displacement through neoliberalism, Ridley Road becomes a landmark through human experience, as opposed to state-controlled designation. Ridley Road was the heart of the 43 Group and 62 Group anti-fascist organisations resisting the rise of Oswald Moseley’s far-right politics post war.² The market and its inhabitants today continue to resist eviction notices, planning applications to demolish the shopping village and contractual alterations to market traders’ rights.³

This project will explore the idea as monument as background, the artefacts that sustain the stalls become monumentalised through memory and the exchange of oral histories, goods, and solidarity. Casting these objects, from games pieces to items of food bought on the market, immortalises them beyond the expected lifetime of these objects. When repositioning them on the market, the artefacts that help preserve it will be foregrounded once more.