Broadway Market traders say they are losing one of the busiest days of the year as the Hackney Half Marathon moves away from the Victorian street bazaar and onto a different route through the borough on Sunday May 17.
More than 25,000 participants are set to run through Dalston, Homerton and London Fields, but until 2025 runners crossed over the Regent's Canal and up through Broadway Market, where businesses say the race once cleared the street for a single Sunday and brought in a surge of spectators. Hackney Council shifted the route away from Broadway Market to make room for the regular Sunday market.
For Alex Bloom, who has run the vegetarian restaurant Aya & Suki on Broadway Market for eight years, the change goes straight to the bottom line. Bloom said that on a Hackney Half day the business would take about £3,000, but with the food market running last year it was more like £500. “This is the one day we make money,” Bloom said. “It's really hard as a hospitality business with only one premises. You're constantly on the edge.”
The market's traders have now turned that frustration into a formal appeal. Twenty-three businesses from Broadway Market wrote to the local authority asking it to review how the event is managed in future, to ensure the widest possible benefit to the local economy and to seriously consider returning the half marathon to its original route.
Broadway Market has long sold itself as a Victorian street bazaar lined with independent shops, cafes, restaurants and bars, and the run became part of that annual rhythm after the Hackney Half began in the borough in 2014. Businesses say the race did more than bring runners past the front door. It pulled crowds to the street and, for one day a year, turned the whole strip into a destination.
That is why the loss of the route feels so sharp to traders such as William Cheshire, who runs a bespoke jewellery business and on-site workshop on Broadway Market. He said he would miss the effect of runners passing through. “This is a real crunch point. The atmosphere is fantastic because you get supporters cheering and echoing around the buildings. It's a big part of the community,” Cheshire said.
Stephane Cusset, who has been trading on Broadway Market for more than two decades and runs the delicatessen and café L’eau à La Bouche at the market's mid-point, said the old route produced a very different kind of day for businesses. “We just made so much more on the Hackney Half when there was no Sunday market. It was a really good day for businesses because it was so busy on the street,” Cusset said.
The council says the route change was made to facilitate the Sunday street market, and that leaves traders with a choice between two competing uses of the same street. For runners, the race still brings a packed route and a familiar spring fixture. For Broadway Market, the question now is whether the borough can keep both the market and the race without forcing one to lose the bigger payday.
