Our Story

London is alive with creators who care deeply about what great hospitality really means. They’re tucked away in pretty much every corner of the capital, and chances are you don’t even know they’re there.

Spend a Saturday wandering around the city’s markets and you’ll find them everywhere. Someone who’s spent an unreasonable amount of time perfecting a hot sauce. Foodie people who simply miss home, so recreated the food they love. Café people passionately claiming their coffee is ‘the best in the capital’. Chocolatiers, fermenters, crafters and all other kinds of, what we like to call, ‘living room businesses’. Generally speaking, brilliant people making brilliant things. The slightly annoying bit is that making something brilliant doesn’t necessarily mean anyone knows you exist. And that’s where our story starts.

Our founder, William, started working in London’s markets at fifteen, as a cheesemonger. He spent years behind market stalls, which is a fairly good way of learning two things: how much incredible independent food and drink is being made in this city, and just how bloody difficult it can be to build a business selling it. You can have the best product in the market, but you still need people to try it. Lots of people. Regularly.

So, in 2021, we opened Wapping Market. We didn’t want to create another market where you buy a loaf of bread, have a quick lap and disappear home. We wanted somewhere you’d actually choose to spend your Saturday. So we put out long tables and benches. We brought in live music. We obsessed over the trader mix, the atmosphere, the marketing and all the little things that make the difference between somewhere people visit and somewhere people hang around.

People hung around.

They ate lunch. Had another drink. Met friends. Discovered traders they’d never heard of. Came back the following Saturday and brought someone else with them. And the traders sold more. Which, underneath all the nice stuff about atmosphere and community, is rather important.

Wapping grew, and within two years The Market Network was running three London markets. The business was growing, which on paper looked like a good thing. But we couldn’t get something out of our heads: there was a lot more we could be doing for our Network. We had to be practical about the limitations of food markets. Limited pitches. Seasonal. Weather dependent. School holiday dependent. Train strike dependent. And there are only so many Saturdays in a year. You get the point. Meanwhile, the Network needed more opportunities, in many cases to survive. So out came the whiteboard, and with it many different coloured pens… 

Don’t get us wrong, markets are fantastic. We love them. We’re called The Market Network, so changing our mind on that now would be inconvenient. They sustain our Network with valuable week-to-week revenue. They’re also a brilliant test bed for new talent: somewhere to access an audience, run the systems, learn what works, adapt what doesn’t and build a business in the real world. But we were also working with brilliant operators who were beginning to outgrow the market, alongside others for whom a traditional market stall was never quite the right fit in the first place. So we needed to have a think, humans vs whiteboard, old school. 

Today, Wapping Market is still our home, affectionately referred to as ‘HQ’, a place where our mission comes to life every Saturday, but The Market Network now goes beyond the markets. Our workshops and masterclasses bring the Network into workplaces, venues and events across London, where they can share the knowledge, skill and slightly obsessive enthusiasm behind what they do. Chocolatiers teaching teams how to make truffles. Growers showing people how to build living terrarium landscapes. Veteran street fooders passing on the knowledge and passion behind making the perfect dumpling. Makers, producers and hospitality people getting out from behind the stall and putting their craft, and themselves, in front of a completely different audience.

So what does this all mean?

It means our clients accessing exceptional grassroots hospitality talent they’re unlikely to find through the usual event suppliers, or frankly by searching online. Small, independent businesses run by people who know their craft, care enormously about what they do, and are passionate about sharing it with the world. 

In return, our Network gets something equally valuable: new audiences, new opportunities and new sources of income beyond the market stall. Revenue that isn’t dependent on the weather, Saturday footfall or whether the trains happen to be running that weekend.

It gives our network of great independent hospitality businesses a better way to grow, and our clients a much more interesting and engaging way of bringing people together.

The format might have changed since that first market in Wapping in April 2021.

The idea hasn’t.

Routes to market for grassroots hospitality talent.