Alaise Antique Market
Alfies occupies an ex-department store – in fact a rather beguilingly tatty terrace of Victorian and 1930s buildings at the eastern end of Church Street in Marylebone, north-west London. In recent years Church Street and the area around it has changed quite a lot. Until the early 1950’s a fairly coherent traditional working class community lived there but then it all began to go downhill. The commercial and shopping focus of the area has always been Church Street itself, which is enlivened by a 150-year-old Saturday street market and a large number of local shops which line both sides of the street.
For nearly a century Church Street's commercial flagship was Jordan’s, a rambling department store encompassing a sales area of more than 30,000 square feet, which had been run by the Jordan family for generations. People remember it having an evocative atmosphere of post war 'make do and mend', with a strong emphasis on things like haberdashery and knicker elastic - which was hardly part of the throwaway swinging sixties. Unsurprisingly, by the early 1970s Jordans went bust and the terrace of old buildings it had come to occupy fell into disrepair. At the same time, and I don't really know why, the entire eastern end of Church Street also fell on hard times. Shops were boarded up and many of the buildings were vandalised. Certainly the gathering social problems of the nearby Lisson Green, a giant 1960's housing estate, didn’t help.
In 1976, with money borrowed from a high street bank, the SPACE Organisation took over the derelict Jordans' premises. The idea was a modest one - to turn the terrace of buildings into a no-nonsense unpretentious antique market with very low overheads and a no nonsense unpretentious name – Alfies. It worked like a dream - and within a matter of weeks nearly one hundred antique dealers had been recruited to the project. To begin with we used only the ground floor and opened on market day Saturdays, but we were so successful that within a couple of years Alfies had grown to fill all four floors of the building and expanded trade to five days a week. Since then we have built two major extensions to accommodate the demand for space and quite a few of the antique dealers who started off with a stall in our market have moved into the once disused neighbouring shops. Now the eastern half of Church Street has become one of the best enclaves for antiques and collectibles in London. Moreover, since Alfies was launched, the whole immediate area has become revitalised in a very interesting, unyuppified and organic manner. Old buildings have been renovated, all sorts of small businesses have sprung up, there is now a healthily diverse mix of people living and working in the area - and many people think that Alfies Antique Market has made an important contribution to the process.
Alaise Antique Market
Alfies occupies an ex-department store – in fact a rather beguilingly tatty terrace of Victorian and 1930s buildings at the eastern end of Church Street in Marylebone, north-west London. In recent years Church Street and the area around it has changed quite a lot. Until the early 1950’s a fairly coherent traditional working class community lived there but then it all began to go downhill. The commercial and shopping focus of the area has always been Church Street itself, which is enlivened by a 150-year-old Saturday street market and a large number of local shops which line both sides of the street.
For nearly a century Church Street's commercial flagship was Jordan’s, a rambling department store encompassing a sales area of more than 30,000 square feet, which had been run by the Jordan family for generations. People remember it having an evocative atmosphere of post war 'make do and mend', with a strong emphasis on things like haberdashery and knicker elastic - which was hardly part of the throwaway swinging sixties. Unsurprisingly, by the early 1970s Jordans went bust and the terrace of old buildings it had come to occupy fell into disrepair. At the same time, and I don't really know why, the entire eastern end of Church Street also fell on hard times. Shops were boarded up and many of the buildings were vandalised. Certainly the gathering social problems of the nearby Lisson Green, a giant 1960's housing estate, didn’t help.
In 1976, with money borrowed from a high street bank, the SPACE Organisation took over the derelict Jordans' premises. The idea was a modest one - to turn the terrace of buildings into a no-nonsense unpretentious antique market with very low overheads and a no nonsense unpretentious name – Alfies. It worked like a dream - and within a matter of weeks nearly one hundred antique dealers had been recruited to the project. To begin with we used only the ground floor and opened on market day Saturdays, but we were so successful that within a couple of years Alfies had grown to fill all four floors of the building and expanded trade to five days a week. Since then we have built two major extensions to accommodate the demand for space and quite a few of the antique dealers who started off with a stall in our market have moved into the once disused neighbouring shops. Now the eastern half of Church Street has become one of the best enclaves for antiques and collectibles in London. Moreover, since Alfies was launched, the whole immediate area has become revitalised in a very interesting, unyuppified and organic manner. Old buildings have been renovated, all sorts of small businesses have sprung up, there is now a healthily diverse mix of people living and working in the area - and many people think that Alfies Antique Market has made an important contribution to the process.