A crowdfund for a book on the history of Ridley Road Market surpassed its funding goal well in advance of its scheduled end.
Photographer Tamara Stoll has filled more than 250 pages with the stories, images and history of the famous open air market. The project is being entirely crowdfunded, and the campaign, which ran until Friday 11 October and aimed to collect £10,000, raised over £14,000 by its deadline.
“I did have an offer from a publisher but I didn’t feel it was the right thing,” said the German-born photographer, who has been taking pictures of the market since 2011.
Inspired by the local focus of the independent Dalston bookshop Centerprise which closed recently, she decided the book should be a local project. It is entirely self-published and will be sold in the Ridley Road market.
“To me it was always the case that the production of the book and the making of the book was a cycle,” she said. “I have taken these stories from the market, I have taken these pictures on the market and the book will be taken back to the market to be sold.”
Hearing about the history of the market from traders, whose families have run stalls for generations, Ms Stoll discovered there “wasn’t much record” of its history in the Hackney Archives.
Looking to fill in the gaps, she filled a market stall with photographs of the market but with a unique price: two postcards for a story about Ridley Road. Often seeing the images themselves would awaken memories in her patrons: “I used photographs also as triggers, because people see these photographs and they may not know the person in them but they recognise something. People go almost into a different state.”
These “histories of the everyday” would form the basis of the book, combined with old photographs found in the Rio Cinema and news clippings about the area’s history of antifascist action.
Any profits made from books sold on the market stall will be donated to the Save Ridley Road campaign, which has fought against the eviction of market traders. The crowdfund will also donate copies of the book to local schools.
Ms Stoll was tentative about just how to classify the new book: “If you think of it as a historical book you might be disappointed. There’s a season to all these different stories and narratives and quotes; it’s more like a really long song with a lot of verses.”
Andrew Kersley is a freelance journalist and student at City University. His previous work has been published in The Times and The i Paper.