Market Making: The past and future of Glasgow's markets

On the second Saturday of the month, alongside Dumbarton Road in Partick, trestle tables and stripy canvas tents appear. The air smells of charcoal and singed meat. It’s market weekend.

I buy hogget and beef, venison, some vegetables. An ebullient Frenchman offers samples of jarred pâté on baguette. The market is busy, full of people. People, and the things they make; other people looking for the things they need. People though, all coming together on a grey Saturday beside a fairly major thoroughfare.

Across the road, there is a Tesco Metro. It’s a Tesco, but it could be any of the big four supermarkets. Almost all the tills have gone now; in their place, silent, implacable, self-service checkouts. An attendant waves away ID checks and unexplained items.

My granny called her shopping “getting the messages.” I don't know the exact etymology of that Scots phrasing, but it speaks to communication. She would have gone to more than one shop: a fishmonger, a butcher, a greengrocer. She would have spoken to the shopkeepers, and they would have spoken to her. Messages, dialogue, back and forth. Interactions. The basis of community. Now, what interactions do we receive from the supermarket? What message does the aisle-end display featuring 30 varieties of microwaveable rice send?

In The Market

UK food culture is “weird” with an unusual focus on supermarkets, according to Henry Dimbleby, the man who led the National Food Strategy, a report detailing the issues in UK food culture and coming up with a plan to fix them. 'Leave it to Tesco' is recognised as the UK government’s approach to food security by Timothy Lang, an emeritus professor of food policy at the University of London.

Supermarkets have a business model where they guarantee prices on staples like milk or lettuce, and compete with each other to cut these to the lowest possible level. This does not reflect the reality of producing crops in a changing environment, so either they, or the farmers, lose money. Usually, it’s the farmers. In recent years, the cracks in this system have shown as food shortages have occurred more frequently.

Supermarkets aren’t markets. There is only one stall.

Just along Dumbarton Road from Partick Farmers Market sits a business school; the Adam Smith Building. Smith enrolled at Glasgow in 1737, and eventually became rector in 1787. He published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, almost 250 years ago. 

According to some, the Kirkcaldy man basically invented our modern interpretation of capitalism and economics. Neoliberal thinktanks quote him in defense of pursuing free markets above all. In reality, Smith was railing against mercantilism, a form of proto-capitalist ideology based in maximising exports and minimising imports. Imposing tariffs. Putting the imperial economy first and bullying other countries into compliance. Perhaps that sounds familiar?

There was more nuance in his approach than just minimising government intervention. Cecilia Rouse, Professor in Economics at Princeton University, spoke at the opening of the Adam Smith building. She said: “Smith is well known for his belief in the virtues of the free market, but it is also his articulation of the necessity of the public sector – from roads to national security, to a legal structure, to benefits like childcare that enable full participation in our economy – that help make his vision so valuable to a new generation.”

Smith believed in the virtues of the free market. However, in his day, there were much bigger, less abstract markets around, which represented what he described as the division of labour. In Glasgow, there was one in the east for meat, one in Candleriggs for fruit. The cheese market on Walls Street. The one by the river, the Briggait, for fish. Now, these exist only as artists’ studios and event spaces.

Smith’s vision of the free market probably looked something like the Partick Farmers Market. Individual traders, acting in their own self interest, but making use of a public square. Driving there on roads funded by the state to facilitate communal acts of capitalism. Commerce, and community.

Trading Places

News in the last year has indicated the last bastions of Britain's great markets, Billingsgate and Smithfield in London, will close or perhaps move. These vast markets will evolve, or die. Along with them will go their traditions, their place in the city’s fabric. They are not really tenable in our modern economy, occupying valuable land in central London.

Glasgow perhaps offers some insight into the unintended consequences of such a decision. We lost our versions of those historic markets long ago. The working class iterations of our food markets have largely disappeared, moved out to Blochairn, to the wholesale market. As they moved from the centre, their role changed, not least their place in the community. The fruit and fish market would once have been busy, frequented by regular people. Now, food shopping at a market seems performative, perhaps even aspirational.

Does any of this matter? Is it misty-eyed nostalgia to long for an inconvenient past? Or an inconvenient truth that we lost our way a long time ago?

Markets – not super ones, but real ones – have soul, because they represent communities, producer to consumer. They represent the best of that most imperfect economic systems, capitalism. Their scarcity and inaccessibility to most of the population in modern Scotland is a reflection of how far wrong modern capitalism has gone.

So is a bi-monthly visit to the farmers market a bougie pretension? Perhaps. However, it’s also a last gasp of something older, better. The market at Partick is growing. It’s a safe bet for traders to come every couple of weeks, to make some money, but more importantly, to meet their regulars and build a community around their enterprise. Is anyone getting rich? Maybe not. But they are trading, and producing something of value, both on the farm, and in the city.

It might not be much. But you know what they say, every little helps.

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Partick Farmers Market, Mansfield Park off Hyndland St, Glasgow, second and fourth Saturday of the month
Grant Reekie is a chef, lecturer, and writer based in Glasgow. You can find him cooking at @thatsyerdinner on instagram.

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This article is from issue two of GNAW, our new Scottish food and drink magazine. Free copies are available in venues across Scotland, or read the full thing via Issuu. Follow GNAW on Instagram @gnawmag