Most of aspirant middle England can think of nothing more horrible than rootling through piles of used junk, getting their hands dirty in the detritus of history. It's as if in a democracy like ours, everybody is in such a hurry to buy their way up the capitalist ladder that the prospect of buying recycled goods is like taking a backwards step. Everything has to be new, you have to prove you can afford to spend in the big-brand shops.
In Argentina the carrier bags from the poshest shops are salable commodities in working class districts.
Middle England has a fetish for choice and shopping behind clean glass, for tills and uniforms, price tags, false sales, carrier bags, one-click shopping and editor’s recommendations. The chaotic display and uncertain pricing of the system at a market like Deptford are not so easy to assimilate as this, which is why the discerning anarchist prefers to shop like this, as a spike to the horrors of the modern mall experience with its signal overloads and pharmaceutical cleanliness.
Deptford is also full of ghosts and allusions.
Middle England has a fetish for choice and shopping behind clean glass, for tills and uniforms, price tags, false sales, carrier bags, one-click shopping and editor’s recommendations. The chaotic display and uncertain pricing of the system at a market like Deptford are not so easy to assimilate as this, which is why the discerning anarchist prefers to shop like this, as a spike to the horrors of the modern mall experience with its signal overloads and pharmaceutical cleanliness.
Deptford is also full of ghosts and allusions.
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Shopping in Deptford at times calls up images from the developing world press-pack, those images you remember of mixed people hurriedly picking over mounds of waste. And so it is here too, but now we have bargain hunting rather than desperate subsistence.
Shopping in Deptford at times calls up images from the developing world press-pack, those images you remember of mixed people hurriedly picking over mounds of waste. And so it is here too, but now we have bargain hunting rather than desperate subsistence.
If like me you come to Deptford to hang out and soak up the atmosphere at London’s most colourful market it’s sometimes worth remembering that there are desperations not far beneath the surface. Sorry to be a killjoy, i say to myself, but this curious spectacle observed from the comfort of the middle class can make your laughter just a little uneasy.
The tramp in the suit is caught after putting on pair of second-hand trainers and leaving his filthy boots behind in their place. The woman stealing the lacy second-hand underwear receives a vicious and racist public dressing down from the bulldog female stall holder.
People shop here because they get a microwave cheaper than anywhere else in London, not because they might stumble across an old bit of art-junk or an interesting bit of furniture.
The market traders here can be brutal or rather have been brutalised by years of dealing with people from a raft of different cultures, all of whom are trying to steal from them. International social codes all go into the one melting pot, worlds of language and taste and bartering and theft all out there on this Deptford square for all the world to see.
The rag traders themselves take on the role of police here - curiously, you never see Old Bill in these parts. To keep order they have been forced to adopt a kind of East End brutality which cuts through social barriers. There is very little space for politesse here (to put it mildly).
The traders have endured years of bad weather and the endless lugging of garden furniture, fishing tackle, kitchen sinks, voltometers, umbrellas, a surprising number of 16mm cine projectors and hundreds and hundreds of ladies shoes daily from the back of their lorries onto the floor, before having to put a lot of it back on the lorries again later in the afternoon.
Wells Tower says there's a whole strata of jobs based on 'picking shit up and putting shit down'.
Here is the history of dirt or rather the dirt of history, the surface muck forming on ourselves as we conspicuously add goods to our lives. It is a history not only of peoples’ desires but of the fashion of their desires. It is a map therefore of universal taste, built in junk.
It is a sobering reminder of how easily we buy into the ‘next big thing’ and how quickly the next big thing becomes the next new scrap. In Deptford VHS players rest on mini-disk players, Walkmans on ATARIs, glass-fibre next to boron, things always changing from metal into plastic, everything becoming more convenient and disposable and mostly worse in quality. Here it is proven how obsessesed we are with technology and how quickly technology becomes obsolete.
For sale at Deptford, at prices which demean the consumer efforts which went into buying all this gear in the first place, is the stuff which floats to the surface when we take our personality away, ‘What portions of me be / Assignable’, in Emily Dickinson’s cool phrasing.
This is a nice way of dressing up the simple fact that for sale here is the stuff we leave behind when we die. Deptford then is an inherently morbid venue.
Seeing tables strewn with the stuff people saved for, that people went into debt for; that people bought one another for Christmas and collected and treasured: this is a warning and a reminder of how viciously quickly time turns us over and scavenges us in the form of bargain hunters from one of South London’s most deprived wards.
The Deptford experience is a spike to the modern idyllic of having whatever you want, whenever you want it. Here you never get anything you want when you want it.
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