Image: Save Ridley Road protestors. Credit: Justin Griffiths-Williams, with kind permission.
For thousands of people Ridley Road is what makes Hackney possible. It is a place of work for more than a hundred independent traders. It is a place where you can buy good food for little money. It is a place that is full of music and joy and transformation like almost nowhere else in London, and the people who use it know that it embodies more than any archive the complex experience of generations of the people who have moved through the borough and fought to make it what it is.
It is, also, a prime piece of underdeveloped real estate, and it is under immediate threat.
