Leadenhall Market: The City's Prettiest Victorian Arcade, and the Flea Market Inside It

On a weekday at one o'clock, Leadenhall Market is a tunnel of people in suits holding pints. On a Sunday it is almost empty, the shops are shut, and the whole thing turns into an enormous cream and maroon room with nothing in it but light coming through the glass. Both versions are worth seeing, and the second one is the one most visitors never catch.

I went on a Sunday when the vintage flea market was in, which turns out to be the best of both: the arcade to yourself, and rails of leather jackets and tables of chipped Wedgwood standing under Victorian ironwork that cost ninety nine thousand pounds in 1881.

A Roman Forum, a Poultry Market and a Great Fire

This is one of the oldest continuously used pieces of ground in London, and the layers underneath it are absurd. Directly beneath the market are the remains of Roman Londinium's forum and basilica.

The first forum here dates from around 70 AD, and the rebuilt version of about 100 AD was the largest basilica and forum complex north of the Alps. A first century mosaic of Bacchus was dug up on the site and is now in the British Museum.

The market proper starts in 1321, when poultry traders were meeting at a lead roofed manor house on the spot, which is where the name comes from.

Dick Whittington, four times Lord Mayor and rather less of a pantomime figure in real life, took the lease in 1408 and gave the site to the City in 1411, which is why the City of London still owns it today. John Croxton built a two storey quadrangle here in 1449, with granaries and a chapel.

The Great Fire of 1666 did for a lot of that. When it was rebuilt it was covered over for the first time and split into three parts: the Beef Market, the Green Yard and the Herb Market. Poultry, game, fish and cheese carried on being sold here for another two hundred years.

Horace Jones and the 1881 Rebuild

The building you walk into now is Victorian. In 1881 Sir Horace Jones, the City Architect, replaced the stone market with an arcade of wrought iron and glass at a cost of around ninety nine thousand pounds, which was an enormous amount of money for a place to sell chickens.

What he built is a cross of four covered avenues meeting at an octagonal crossing, which rises into a dome and a lantern. The roof is a barrel vault of glass held on painted iron ribs.

The columns are giant cast iron Ionic ones, and if you look at the tops of them there are dragons, the City of London's own emblem, worked into the ironwork. Over the entrance arches the date is set in gold: A.D. 1881. The whole thing is painted in cream, maroon and a deep green that in certain light reads almost black.

Jones is the reason the place feels familiar even if you have never been. He also did Billingsgate and Smithfield markets, and he designed Tower Bridge, which was still being built when he died in 1887. The same appetite for decorated ironwork runs through all of it.

It was listed Grade II in 1972, restored in the early 1990s when the paintwork and the shopfronts were brought back, and it celebrated its seven hundredth anniversary in 2021.

What Leadenhall Market Looks Like on a Sunday

The thing that makes Leadenhall Market photograph so well is that it has no bad angle and almost no modern intrusion at eye level. The shopfronts are all dark green and gold and deep red, numbered in gilt, with proper hanging signs. The cobbles are real. The lanterns are real. Look up anywhere and you get glass, ribs and painted plasterwork.

The single best spot is standing under the octagon at the crossing and looking along one of the avenues to the arch at the end, with the clock hanging over you and the street outside showing as a bright rectangle. Second best is the opposite move: stand at the Gracechurch Street end and look in, so the arcade closes over your head and the crowd funnels away from you.

In the City, Sunday is the day this works. The offices are empty, so the market is not being used as a canteen, and you can actually see the floor.

Five Details to Look For

The dragons. They are worked into the tops of the cast iron columns, wings out, and once you have seen one you will find them all the way along. They are the City of London's emblem rather than a Victorian flourish, and they are the giveaway that this is a City building rather than just a pretty arcade.

The date. Over each of the main arches, A.D. 1881 is set into the ironwork in gold on a green ground, with a painted shield either side. It is the single most photographed thing here after the roof, and it is at its best from directly underneath, looking up at a slight angle.

The clock. It hangs at the crossing on an ornate bracket, and it is the thing that makes the wide shot work, because it gives the middle of the frame something to sit on.

The shop numbers. Every unit has its number in gilt on the fascia, and the numbering runs in a sequence that makes no sense until you realise it follows the old market stalls rather than the street. Thirteen, seventeen, eighteen, twenty two, twenty three, all in that fat Victorian serif.

The floor. It is granite setts and cobbles, not resin, and it is uneven in the way real old paving is. In the rain it throws the whole roof back at you, which is why a wet day here is better than a dry one.

The Vintage Furniture and Flea Market

Leadenhall now runs a proper programme of weekend markets, which is the reason to build a Sunday around it rather than just passing through.

The Vintage Furniture and Flea Market takes over the arcade on the last Sunday of the month from April to October, midday to five, free to walk into. Dealers bring mid century furniture, lighting, rugs, retro homeware and the sort of one off objects you did not know you wanted.

The day I went there were rails of leather and suede jackets parked under the glass roof, trestle tables of transferware plates and floral teacups, a wall of framed watercolours leaning against a wine merchant's window, stacks of canvas prints at thirty pounds each or two for fifty, and a man carefully turning over a box of old radios.

There is also a craft fair, the SoLo Craft Fair, on the second Saturday of the month from April to December, same hours, also free. That one is jewellery, art, textiles and small makers rather than furniture.

If rummaging is the point of the day rather than the architecture, it pairs well with the Classic Car Boot Sale at King's Cross, which is the other London vintage event I would clear a weekend for.

The Pubs, the Shops and the Cheese

On a weekday the market is a working lunch and drinks destination, and the tenants are better than you would expect from somewhere this photographed.

The Lamb Tavern has been on the site since 1780 and is the anchor: tiled, narrow, and on a warm evening it spills out across the cobbles until the whole crossing is one standing drink. Amathus does wines and spirits out of a beautiful dark shopfront.

There is a cheesemonger, a florist, a shoe shine, a tobacconist, an optician, and a run of places to eat that includes a French brasserie, an Italian osteria, Spanish tapas, Japanese street food and a burger place, which is a fairly accurate cross section of what the City eats.

Nearly all of it is closed at the weekend. That is the trade off: Sunday gives you the empty arcade, weekdays give you the market as a living thing. If you want both, come late on a Friday afternoon.

The Harry Potter Bit

Yes, it is in the films. Leadenhall Market stood in for the wizarding street leading to the Leaky Cauldron in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 2001, and the doorway used as the pub entrance is in Bull's Head Passage, the narrow alley off the main crossing. It is an optician's now, which is an extremely Leadenhall thing to have happened.

People do come specifically for this and then stay for the building, which I think is the right order. You will find the blue door easily enough; the arcade above it is the thing that will actually stop you.

Visiting Leadenhall Market: Practical Notes

📍 Address: Gracechurch Street, London EC3V 1LT. The entrances are on Gracechurch Street, Lime Street and Whittington Avenue.

🚉 Getting there: Monument and Bank are both about five minutes' walk, Aldgate and Liverpool Street about ten, and Fenchurch Street is around the corner. It sits in the middle of the cluster of tall buildings, so the Lloyd's building, the Gherkin, the Cheesegrater and the Scalpel are all within two minutes and the contrast between them and the Victorian ironwork is half the fun.

🕒 Opening: the arcade is a public thoroughfare, so you can walk through it at any time of day or night, and it is free. The shops and restaurants mostly run Monday to Friday, roughly from mid morning to late evening, with limited or no weekend trading outside market days.

📷 Best time to go: weekday lunchtime and early evening for atmosphere, Sunday for the building and the flea market, December for the decorations, which are among the best in the City. Early morning on any day gives you the arcade empty if you only want photographs.

🗺️ Nearby: the Sky Garden, the Lloyd's building, St Helen's Bishopsgate and the Roman wall by Tower Hill are all short walks, and the rooftop terrace at 25 Cannon Street is a good free view if you want height afterwards. In December the market's own lights are worth adding to a walk of the city's best Christmas displays.

Leadenhall Market has been a market for seven hundred years, a Roman civic centre before that, and is currently a place where you can buy a mid century lamp underneath a dragon. Very few buildings in London carry that much without feeling like a museum, and this one is still just a street you can walk down.

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All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.