Market or mall?

    So runs the blurb on the Norwich City Council Web site that describes the market, which while certainly facing the four-square French-built Norman castle constructed of huge blocks of sculpted Caen stone, which dominates the city center, has its back covered, so to speak, by Norwich City Hall, a somewhat more recent and uglier all-brick edifice, which with its clock tower, makes it resemble Battersea Power Station minus three chimneys.

    The market includes all the usual suspects: clothes and shoe stalls, fresh fruit and vegetables, butchers and fishmongers, cheese-makers, gifts, newsagents, DIY products and numerous “refreshment” stalls ranging from traditional pie and tea, fish and chips or seafood and filled baked potatoes on through to Chinese eat-at or take-away. The alleys are narrow; the whole market is laid out in Haussmann-like chess-board efficiency, each stall now a metal cabin with a colorful roof all identical in size and shape, regulated, regimented and slightly ridiculous. This is a New Labour Lego market. CCTV cameras keep watch; patrols of police “community support officers” pass up and down at regular intervals. At the top of the slope, there are some public benches where assorted shoppers mingle with market staff on their breaks, the homeless and the unemployed to drink tea and scoff fast food or scoff at passers-by. It is, nevertheless, all so predictably polite and politically correct, so muted and restrained, so soulless.

Changes in Norwich     

When I left Norwich 12 years ago, the market was tightly packed and organized, certainly, but the stalls were still canvas and so looked like a market. It was noisy as traders sought to sell their wares on the cry in the way of fishermen down at the harbor, just in with their catch, like they still do in ports such as Marseille or, indeed, along the Bosporus. But apart from the smell of cooking from competing catering stalls, a burst of laughter from a shared joke or the sound of a frustrated mother screeching at her unruly children, it now feels depressingly like an outdoor shopping mall in that senseless, sanitized, globalized way they have. And you can't smoke here either. What is more, by five o'clock all the steel shutters are down and only pigeons and (surprisingly little) litter blows down the aisles.

    How very different from markets I have enjoyed in İstanbul. There are the classics, of course, such as the covered Grand Bazaar in Beyazit or the fragrant Spice Bazaar in Eminönü, organized, perhaps, but in that wonderfully chaotic Turkish way that still allows for shouting and haggling, teasing, testing and trying and the certainty of surprise, however many times you visit. Or over in Kadıköy, for example, the “Balık Pazarı” (Fish Market) so packed with people, assaulting the olfactory senses with the odors of meat and fish and spices and the perfume of humanity, the beating on your eardrums of the delicious decibels of competing conversations. There is that essence of communication between commerce and customer which you can engage in or simply observe vicariously and experience as you sip a coffee or quench your thirst with a beer at a terrace table. Wonderful!

    Of course, there are also the various street markets that occur daily in succession around the different districts, of which the twice-weekly “Salı Pazarı” (Tuesday Market, now on Fridays as well) in Kadıköy itself is the biggest. With their canvas roofs stretched across the streets and their trestle tables groaning under piles of produce that punters pick through in search of the perfect bargain, these are what I recall as real markets.

    Elsewhere across the country, we are seeing the resurrection of the “Farmer's Markets” greeted with wonder by the weekly shopper as the perfect antidote to the anemic supermarkets. Many of the towns around the UK are what are still known as “Market Towns” except that the markets involved had deteriorated into a rag, tag and bobtail collection of tat (cheap clothes), Taiwanese bric-a-brac, hot dog stalls and second-hand junk. Fortunately, while I have been away, a wonderful revolution has taken place and now farmers, local butchers, vegetable growers, cheese-makers, fishmongers, knitting groups and textile manufacturers along with many other “local” providers are given a weekly showcase for their wares. These more closely bring to mind the street markets of İstanbul that I enjoyed so much and before these, the traditional town square rotating daily markets that I was familiar with during the 10 years I lived in France. Saturday was always the day my French girlfriend and I looked forward to as we descended from the ancient Roman fortified village up on the plateau above the Gorge de l'Ardèche, where we were living in the southeast of France, to the medieval town of Pont-Saint-Esprit and a wonderfully eclectic market of farm produce or homemade products rubbing shoulders with commercial clothes and shoe stalls often selling loss-leaders from main-stream manufacturers. There are shops here, as in Turkey, that sell these items under the “Factory Outlet” theme, but it was somehow so much nicer to browse the street stalls in search of such bargains as may have been on offer.

A matter of age?    

I once did a survey in one of my upper-level classes in Kadıköy that tried to ascertain the students' preference between supermarkets (or hypermarkets like Carrefour) and street markets. The older students (30 plus) generally favored the street markets, while the under 30s tended toward the super/hyper markets. The fact that these monsters are making a mockery of merchandising as a customer-focused process seemed to be outweighed by the price factor in these increasingly economically straightened times. Similarly, there was a marked delight expressed in the burgeoning shopping mall development, not only for the variety of shops literally under one roof, but also of them being part of some kind of modern social activity. Sundays at the shopping mall has become a fundamental factor in modern society that has replaced trips to the countryside, attendance at local sports events, a visit to a park -- admittedly limited in İstanbul -- or, if the weather is inclement, playing games together around the kitchen or dining table. “Supermarket Sweep” is even a TV game here, whereby people have a limited time to race around a supermarket and basket as many products as possible. How sad is that, combining two socially destructive mediums in one fell swoop?