A South London Makers Market is no more. Meet Salad Days Market.
🌀 We’ve got big news… We’ve changed our name! A South London Makers Market (ASLMM) is now called Salad Days Market 💕
On a complete whim, in December 2019 we decided to host a market in our local library in Crystal Palace. With zero events experience and no real idea what the hell we were doing, the event went ahead. Like the crescendo of a cheesy 90s film, hundreds of people showed up and there was an absolutely electric energy in the air. It felt like magic! Like we’d finally found what we were always supposed to be doing.
Just one day later Liv got fired from her day job. Needing a way to earn a living and inspired by our all time favourite South London hero, Del Boy, she started visiting our local car boot sale on the lookout for cool homeware she could buy and sell. On one of her weekly visits she stumbled across a box of vintage theatre booklets. Each pamphlet had been carefully collected by a woman called Beryl over five decades; there were literally hundreds of them. As we looked through our box of treasure, we found so many for a show called Salad Days.
At a time in our life we both felt stuck, scared and fearful of the future, learning about Salad Days was like the epiphany we’d been waiting for, and suddenly we could appreciate the position we were in. Every negative was flipped on its head: being young, inexperienced and hungry for more meant life’s possibilities were at our fingertips. These were our Salad Days!
With a strong sense of enthusiasm, passion, and a willingness to keep forging ahead, we’ve continued running events ever since. Born out of an Instagram interiors Instagram account we had at the time, we chose the name A South London Makers Market for our event! But now, three years later, having expanded beyond South London, we thought it made sense to give our brand an update.
The market has become a beacon for shopping small, and a place for positivity, community, and connection. A place to have the time of your life! And so only one new name made sense: Salad Days.
The phrase “Salad Days” is a Shakespearean idiom referring to a period of carefree innocence, idealism and innocence and is often associated with youth. It’s a phrase we’ve loved and used since we first heard it in Spandeau Ballet’s iconic song “Gold”, which opens with the phrase, “These are our salad days…” The whole phrase really just encapsulates the vibe we always want to create with our events, as we always want them to be the kind of place you can live your best life, the backdrop to happy memories and moments in your life. Salad Days just felt right!
We’re on a mission to infuse this magical positive energy into the flailing world of retail and we hope we can do just that. We’ve got loads of things on the horizon under our new name, and can’t wait to see what the future holds. We hope you’ll join us on our journey, and come to one of our events soon. Let the good times roll!
