Case study · (add: year)
East Street Market
Field research and a sonic intervention at East Street Market in south London. Interviews with stall owners, a training shift on a fruit and veg stall, and a sound piece responding to the rhythm of the street.
Researcher & designer (group project)
Context
East Street Market is a long-running street market in Walworth, south London. The brief was open: spend time in a public space, understand it through the people who run it, and make something that responds.
Field research
- Interviews with stall owners across the market — produce, household goods, fabric, food. - Repeated visits across different days and times to hear how the market changes. - Field recordings of the soundscape: calls between stalls, customer exchanges, traffic, the physical noise of setting up and packing down.
Working with Adam
The main collaborator was Adam, a fruit and veg stall owner. Conversations with Adam shaped most of what we made. He let us spend a training session on the stall, where we learned a small slice of what the work actually is: - the order of setting up - pricing on the fly - the rhythm of calling out to passers-by - the physical pace of a busy hour That session was the project's turning point. The market stopped being a subject we were observing and became something we'd been briefly part of.
What we made
A sonic intervention built from the recordings and the time on the stall. (add: a paragraph describing the piece — where it played, how long, what the form was, who heard it.)
My role
(add: what you specifically did — recording, editing, interviewing, composing the sound piece, on-stall participation, etc.)
What I'd do differently
(add: one honest reflection. Keep it short.)