Borough Market — the covered food market around you, all stalls and shouted prices and the smell of a dozen different cuisines at once. People treat this as a modern foodie destination, and it is. But excavations here have turned up evidence of trading activity on this exact spot going back roughly two thousand years, to the Roman period. There is almost nowhere else in London where you can say that with a straight face. Rome fell. The stalls kept going.
By the eighteen sixties, though, the market nearly lost to progress in a much more modern way. The South Eastern Railway wanted to run its new line straight through here, from London Bridge out toward Charing Cross. The most direct route went right through the market's footprint. And this wasn't even the market's first brush with being shut down for getting in the way. Back in twelve seventy-six, the market had already grown so congested that wide coaches jamming the narrow approach to London Bridge got it temporarily suppressed by th
e authorities entirely. The very first recorded threat to Borough Market's existence predates the railway by nearly six hundred years. Traffic was the culprit both times.
Six centuries later, the obvious solution was to flatten it. Instead, somebody negotiated a genuinely strange compromise. The railway got permission to build an elevated viaduct directly OVER the market, on stilts, rather than t
