Bermondsey was a working district long before it became a foodie one. Sitting on the south bank just upstream of the Pool of London, the area served the merchant marine for centuries - tanneries, rope walks, vinegar factories, leather warehouses, biscuit bakeries, breweries. The buried River Neckinger passes a few yards from the southern end of the market walk, remembered now only in the name of Millstream Road. Maltby Street itself was once the site of a ropewalk belonging to Robert Rich; the name has carried over to the market yard, which the salvage company LASSCO still uses to store reclaimed floorboards on weekdays. Within half a mile lie Bevington's Neckinger Mills, the 1814 Sarsons vinegar factory, the 1909 Leathersellers' College, the Hepburn and Gale tannery, and the Anchor Brewery beside Tower Bridge - the granite-and-yellow-stock-brick bones of an industrial empire that has, mostly, slipped into history.

The railway arches that run the length of the market were built between 1836 and 1839 for the London and Greenwich Railway, the first steam railway in the capital and the earliest elevated railway in the world. The decision to elevate the entire line on a brick viaduct - some 878 arches in total - came down to cost: cheaper than tunneling, and it freed the ground beneath for letting. Nearly two centuries later those same arches still carry Southeastern trains from London Bridge to Greenwich, the noise echoing rhythmically through the market below. The viaduct made many of the spaces on Maltby Street possible: workshops, warehouses, eventually antique dealers after Islington's Caledonian Market relocated to Bermondsey Square in 1950, and finally the salvage yards and food stalls of today.

In 2009 a group of Borough Market traders began renting storage in railway arches around Maltby Street, about a mile from their main pitches. The Monmouth Coffee Company opened its arch on Saturdays to sell coffee, and other producers followed - selling cheese, charcuterie, oysters, terrines - to their fellow traders and curious neighbours. By 2011 the situation had become awkward. Borough Market evicted seven traders for running a competing venue. Those traders responded with a public broadside against what they saw as Borough's slide from a wholesale producers' market into a takeaway food court with poor facilities. Nine of them left for Maltby Street, joined by others. The breakaway market grew. The point of friction never fully resolved, but it gave London a second weekend food market that felt more like the original Borough than Borough itself.

On a typical weekend Maltby Street fits roughly thirty traders along the narrow walk between Tanner Street and Millstream Road, with more set up inside the railway arches that flank the route. The cast rotates - some traders stay for years, others cycle out and new ones cycle in. A French bakery sells cakes and pastries from an oven-side shop throughout the week; three permanent concessions are open Wednesday to Sunday. On Saturdays the hours run from ten to five, on Sundays from eleven to four, with certain stalls trading later into the evening. The crowd is generally local, partly tourist, mostly genuinely interested in what they are eating. The Financial Times has called it one of London's best street-food markets; so have Time Out and the Evening Standard. None of those endorsements changes the fundamental texture of the place, which still smells like grilled bread and feels like a salvage yard borrowed for the weekend.

What gives Maltby Street its particular character is the host: LASSCO, the London Architectural Salvage and Supply Company, has occupied the yard for decades, dealing in reclaimed timber, stone, fittings, and architectural fragments. The food market was originally pitched in 2009 as a way to put the yard to use on its quiet weekends. On Friday evenings the firm packs away its machinery and stacks of reclaimed floorboards to make space for the stalls; on Sunday evenings they come back out. The market has never quite shed that improvisational quality. The stalls are temporary. The arches are nearly two hundred years old. The trains keep running overhead.