Our Story
Most markets sprawl. This one bends: one corridor looped like a horseshoe, thirty small doors, and seventy years of people finding things they weren’t looking for.
Before the market there was a cinema, and before the cinema there was a village. The building has been showing people things they did not expect since 1912. Here is how it got from there to here.
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1873
A village gets a station
Wood Street was one of the four original settlements of Walthamstow, and it stayed a village on the edge of the forest long after the rest of the town had grown up. The railway arrived on 17 November 1873, with cheap workmen’s fares into Liverpool Street, and the terraces followed. Within a generation Wood Street was a proper high street with its own shops, pubs and, before long, its own picture house.
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October 1912
The Wood Street Picture Palace opens
The Penny Picture Theatre Company opened its cinema here in October 1912. The auditorium sat behind the row of shops, running parallel to the street, and you reached it down a long narrow passage from Wood Street. Nine hundred people at a time sat on wooden benches on a single floor to watch the pictures. Wood Street was making films as well as showing them: the street had its own studios from 1914 until 1932, turning out silents and then talkies.
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1914 to 1950
The Crown
By 1914 the Picture Palace had become the Crown Picture Theatre, and the Crown it stayed, through a string of independent owners, for the next forty years. The benches gave way to proper cinema seats and the capacity settled at 650. It was the Crown Cinema by 1947, then the New Crown, and it showed its last film under that name on 8 July 1950.
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1953 to 1955
A short second run as the Rio
New management reopened the building in 1953 as the Rio Cinema. It lasted two years. The Rio closed in 1955, and with it Wood Street’s forty-odd years as a place to watch films.
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1955
The market opens
The same year the projector stopped, the traders moved in. The building became an indoor market in 1955 and has been one ever since: small units, low rents, and one long corridor that bends round in a horseshoe so no shop is ever a dead end. Over the decades it built a reputation across London for antiques, collectables and records, the kind of place where you go in for one thing and come out with three.
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2011 to 2012
The big revamp
By the end of the 2000s the market had gone shabby and many of its units stood empty. The Mayor of London’s Outer London Fund picked Wood Street for regeneration, with the market at the heart of it. A team led by East Architects, with Gort Scott on the building itself, gave it a new front, new signage, a proper entrance on Marlowe Road and a freshened-up interior, and the entrance was painted like a circus big top. More than 160 people applied for the newly empty units and 21 new traders were chosen to join the old hands. The market relaunched in February 2012, and the Mayor came down to meet the tenants.
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2019
The auditorium goes, the market stays
The old cinema auditorium at the back, long past use, was demolished and homes built on the site. The front of the old picture house, the passage the audience once queued down, carries on as the market. Which means the corridor you walk today is the same one that led to the pictures a century ago.
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2026
Walthams take over
Walthams, the letting agent for this corner of Walthamstow, took over the running of the market in 2026, with plans for the empty units, the frontage and a proper programme of fairs and late openings. 24 shops trade here today, Tuesday to Saturday: vintage, records, jewellery, toys, books, crafts, beauty and a juice bar, a couple of minutes from the station that started it all.
Traded here? Shopped here since the sixties?
We are collecting the market’s history: photographs, receipts, memories, tall tales. Help us tell it properly.
Share a memory →The story continues on the shop floor
24 independents are writing the next chapter, Tuesday to Saturday.