Broadway Market is full for two days. London Fields is a park for the other five.

London Fields

12.65 hectares of park, Broadway Market closed to traffic on its western edge, and a trading week that peaks on Saturday.

London Fields covers 12.65 hectares and was recorded as common pasture land adjoining Cambridge Heath as early as 1275, first named London Field in 1540 and used by drovers before market transport existed. A game of cricket here was recorded as early as 1802, and the cricket square still hosts competitive matches from late April to mid-September. A wide arc of plane trees on the park's northern and eastern edges marks land restored after Second World War bombing destroyed the houses that stood there, and a heated 50-metre lido with its own cafe sits inside the park.

Broadway Market has traded since 1883, when it had 35 stalls selling vegetables, fruit, flowers, eggs and meat. That trade dwindled by the early 2000s, and a Saturday food market relaunched on 8 May 2004; the street now closes to traffic at weekends between nine and five. Four of Hackney's thirty-five conservation areas sit on this ground - Broadway Market, Albion Square, Beck Road, and Graham Road and Mapledene - and a station sits on the park's eastern edge.

For nine hours - nine until five, weekends only - Broadway Market's traffic closure turns the street into the busiest ground in this part of Hackney, and the plane-tree edge of the park fills with people who came for the stalls and the lido rather than for you. That gives London Fields' businesses an extreme version of a problem every seasonal trader has: huge Saturday demand, a much quieter Monday-to-Friday either side of it, and a website written as though every day were market day. Being explicit about weekday hours, weekday offers and how to order or book from Broadway Market or the park midweek is the job the market's traffic closure can't do for you on its own.