Lowri Griffiths Notes That London’s Most Famous Food Market Is Now Priced at a Level Where the Tourists Cannot Afford It Either

Borough Market’s Tourist Problem Has Solved Itself by Becoming Too Expensive

I grew up in Wales, which means I have a specific relationship with markets — they are for buying things — that has not prepared me well for London’s version, which is partly for buying things, partly for photographing things before buying them, and partly for standing extremely still in a crowd while holding a paper cup of something that costs six pounds and considering your choices.

Borough Market is the apex of this phenomenon. I used to avoid it on weekends because of the tourists. I have recently been back on a Saturday for the first time in two years and I have a genuinely unexpected update: the tourists are still there, but they have been joined, in approximately equal numbers, by Londoners who are also there as spectators rather than shoppers, because the prices have reached a level where the distinction between the person looking at the £18 slice of truffle cheese and the person buying it has collapsed. We are all looking at the truffle cheese. Most of us are not buying it.

What Things Cost

I took notes. A scotch egg: £6. A small portion of paella: £14. A canelé: £4.50, which is honestly fair and I did buy one. A chorizo roll: £10, which I did not buy but watched approximately thirty people buy, so the market for it exists, and it exists among people with a different relationship to their food budget than I have developed in three years of North London renting. A wedge of raw milk cheese: £22, for a wedge that I estimated at approximately 200 grams, making the implied per-kilogram price competitive with certain medical equipment.

The experience of Borough Market in 2026 is the experience of London concentrated: beautiful things surrounded by a crowd in which the ratio of people looking to people buying creates a specific ambient tension that is not quite desire and not quite frustration but somewhere between them, in the same postcode as appreciation. It is absolutely worth going for the atmosphere, the quality of what’s on offer, and the canelé, which I maintain at £4.50 is correctly priced. It is not worth going if you want to do your weekly shop. It is excellent if you want to do your weekly browse.

London food and life at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. London market culture at MyLondon. Further at santaclaus.top and London Prat Bluesky. London life and laughter at The Daily Mash.

What Borough Market Actually Is

I should be honest about what Borough Market is in 2026: it is a destination for the food-curious, a media set for the food-photographing, and a genuinely excellent concentration of food producers and artisans who are doing real work and selling real things at prices calibrated to people who earn more than I do but who have collectively maintained a market that was in genuine decline twenty years ago and is now one of the most visited food destinations in Europe. The economics that have made it inaccessible to me as a weekly shop have also made it viable as a business, and the producers selling the expensive cheese and the expensive scotch egg are doing so to a customer who will pay for quality, which is not nothing. What is lost is the version of the market that served the neighbourhood — the market that was someone’s Tuesday rather than someone’s occasion — and what is gained is an institution that has survived in a part of London where nothing else from 2006 survives unchanged. I will keep going for the canelé. I will not pretend it is my local market. I am making my peace with this, which is what you do in London when the city becomes itself more fully than it used to be and you can’t quite afford to be fully in it.

London does this to you, eventually. You arrive thinking you will master it — that you will find the affordable flat, the manageable commute, the market that still serves the neighbourhood, the cycle lane that doesn’t nearly kill you, the landmark that hasn’t been sold to someone richer. And what you actually find, after enough time, is that London is not a place you master. It is a place you negotiate — constantly, on its terms, with your own resources, doing your best with what’s available and adjusting when it changes and laughing, when you can, at the gap between what you expected and what you got. I expected a city. I got this city. It is, despite everything and including everything, exactly what I came for. Though I am still looking for the flat.

Three years in North London and I am still surprised by it, which I think is the right pace. If you stop being surprised by London you have either mastered it, which is impossible, or stopped paying attention, which is a waste. The people who have been here for thirty years and claim to have figured it out are the people who have decided which parts to pay attention to and have stopped noticing the rest. I am not there yet. I am still noticing the man asleep standing up, and the cycling near-miss, and the impossible canelé price, and the Battersea turbine hall at dusk when the light comes through the Victorian brick and the scaffolding of a new flat development is visible through the industrial windows and the whole thing is beautiful and strange and specifically London in a way that I couldn’t have understood from Cardiff and that I am still, three years in, only beginning to understand here. This is fine. This is, actually, exactly fine.