The carefully stage-managed royal visit to the ancient street market had King Charles meeting various hangers-on, while stallholders were denied a chance to raise their growing concerns
Protest silenced: the Met arrested market trader Jose Joseph on Surrey Street yesterday
It was not all sweetness and light on Surrey Street for the royal visit yesterday, as one of the street market’s longest-standing stallholders found himself hauled away by the police for the heinous crime of… holding a bunch of flowers to give to King Charles.
Jose Joseph, who was an independent candidate in the mayoral election earlier this year after a brief dabble with the racists of Reform Ltd, also wanted to protest at the misuse of £4.4million earmarked money for improvements to the market to try to revive its traders’ flagging businesses.
Joseph’s fruit and veg stalls are at the Church Street end of the market. Eyewitnesses saw the well-known business owner manhandled by police through the crowd that had gathered in Surrey Street to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the market being granted a royal charter. Four officers were seen restraining him, his hands tied behind his back, as he was led from Millett’s Corner and down Scarbrook Road.
There was no struggle by Joseph, but he could be heard shouting “I’m a market trader”, and “Corruption!” and “Four and a half million!”
What the King didn’t see: Jose Joseph was dragged the length of Surrey Street by police. Photo: Fannie Leibovitz
It is now more than two years since the cash-strapped council boasted of securing a £4.45million pot to revive Surrey Street Market. The 750th landmark anniversary has been and gone, with Tory Mayor Jason Perry having enjoyed his afternoon basking in the reflected glory of being within touching distance of King Charles. Perry’s deputy mayor, Lynne Hale, even splashed out on a new hat for meeting the King.
Meanwhile, Joseph and other stall-holders and Croydon shoppers are asking questions about what Perry’s council has done with the money earmarked for the market.
Council financial reports show that Perry’s council has already burned through hundreds of thousands of pounds on “co-production” workshops, heritage research, visual identities and architectural masterplanning.
Council muppets: there’s precious little to show for the £4m market improvement fund. But at least Lynne Hale’s got a new titfer
The traders say that the basic, practical improvements they actually asked for have been ignored and left undone.
Part-time Perry has repeatedly trumpeted the £4.45million “Amplifying Surrey Street” budget as a coup, declaring: “This is not about cosmetic change. It is about making Surrey Street safer, more attractive… We are listening, prioritising and investing carefully.”
In truth, the direct grant from City Hall’s Civic Partnership Programme is £814,000.
The lion’s share of the Surrey Street pot — £3million — comes from the unironically named Croydon Growth Zone, a business-rate retention scheme overseen by the council, topped up with £634,000 in third-party contributions.
Yet since the scheme was mobilised in September 2024, the council’s spending has followed a depressingly familiar Croydon template: plenty of cash for external consultants and talking shops, very little visible change for the people trying to earn a living in the market.
In the 2024-2025 financial year, the council budgeted £410,000 — virtually all of it swallowed up by early-stage “soft” costs. Rather than fixing broken infrastructure, council officials brought in external facilitators from the Co-Production Collective to run “Surrey Street Action Group” workshops, alongside consultants commissioned to draw up masterplans and research the market’s history.
Back to normal: once the circus left town, Surrey Street got back to business
By the 2025-2026 financial year, the council’s own financial performance reports admitted that £343,000 of that initial pot had gone unspent and had to be rolled over into a revised £808,000 allocation. Even then, the money was largely tied up in “detailed design” rather than spades in the ground.
For long-suffering stall-holders, the parallels with the council’s botched £1.2million Surrey Street facelift back in 2017 — which saw casual market licences plummet by 87% — are hard to ignore.
Back in early 2025, traders handed Mayor Perry a list of practical fixes, including improved electrical supplies, better CCTV and suggesting that “adding public toilets will significantly enhance the comfort and convenience of visitors”.
The council rejected calls for permanent stalls and instead poured public cash into a sign, some planters and yet more “rebranding” exercises.
Last week, Jose Joseph cut straight to the heart of what the consultants have missed: “Public safety is the most important concern. If it’s not safe, the customers won’t come.” From his market pitch, Joseph has been witness to several knife attacks, including the 2024 murder of 22-year-old Rijkaard Siafa.
Kathy Gilliam, another market trader whose family has worked the street for generations, pointed to basic drainage failures that still leave stall-holders “standing in puddles” whenever it rains.
By royal appointment: the King met only carefully hand-picked figures, including several Tory councillors – none of them from the local ward – and a few Perry hangers on
Perry insists the scheme is “not done to the community” but “with them”, with the bulk of the £3million Growth Zone capital scheduled for physical works running through to September 2027.
More than 35 local business owners have signed a petition demanding permanent stalls rather than cosmetic gateways. With stallholders dragged away for protesting about the lack of real progress, traders can be forgiven for questioning why so much public money has been spent telling them what their market needs, rather than simply delivering it.
Inside Croydon put several questions to Jose Joseph and the Metropolitan Police, but neither managed to respond by the time of publication.
Read more: Street market licences fall by 87% after council ‘improvements’
Read more: Murder on Surrey Street Market: police make one arrest
Read more: Only half the stalls return to Surrey Street after £1.1m scheme
Read more: Hipsterdom is alive and thriving at £8 per pint in Surrey Street
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