The market's roots run back to the old Spitalfields district, where a wholesale fruit and vegetable trade had operated just off Bishopsgate since the 17th century. By the late 20th century that historic site was buckling: traffic jammed the narrow streets, lorries had nowhere to park, and the refrigeration technology was decades behind the times. Something had to give. The decision to relocate followed a pattern already set by two of London's other great wholesale markets — Covent Garden Market had moved to Nine Elms in 1974, and Billingsgate Fish Market had shifted to the Isle of Dogs in 1982. Spitalfields was next. The new, purpose-built market in Leyton opened in May 1991 on a 31-acre site in the London Borough of Waltham Forest, exchanging Victorian iron and cobblestone for refrigerated halls and vast concrete aprons.

The move did not simply transplant one market onto new ground. A second wholesale market folded into it at the same time: the Stratford Market, founded in 1879 by the Great Eastern Railway as a deliberate competitor to the original Spitalfields operation. For over a century the two markets had vied for the same buyers and suppliers. When the Leyton site opened, both operations consolidated under one roof. The result was a combined enterprise with the weight and volume to become the largest revenue-earning wholesale market in the United Kingdom and the leading horticultural market in Europe, specialising in the exotic and unusual — varieties that supermarkets rarely carry, sourced from suppliers across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The Old River Lea runs quietly along the site's western edge, a small reminder of the wider East London landscape the market now inhabits.

The market hall today is a world built for professionals, not tourists. Its 115 trading units are occupied by wholesalers who deal in fruit, vegetables, and flowers; the supporting infrastructure — cold storage rooms, ripening rooms, palletised racking, forklift services, diesel suppliers — is calibrated for volume and speed. Four separate buildings provide units for catering supply companies, while office space, maintenance facilities, and a dedicated Market Constabulary round out the operation. The scale is industrial, the pace relentless. Restaurateurs, greengrocers, and caterers who arrive in the pre-dawn hours find a market built entirely around their needs rather than the casual browser. Security and practicality govern everything.

In 2019, the City of London Corporation — which owns and administers New Spitalfields — floated an ambitious plan to consolidate three of its wholesale markets onto a single new site at Dagenham Dock, bringing Billingsgate Fish Market and Smithfield together with Spitalfields. A planning application was submitted in 2020 and approved in outline in March 2021. But the economics proved impossible. In November 2024, the Corporation announced it would not proceed; Billingsgate and Smithfield would close from 2028 onward. New Spitalfields Market alone was unaffected. The announcement confirmed what the market's scale and earnings had long suggested: it is not a heritage curiosity or a civic amenity but a genuinely indispensable piece of London's food supply chain, too productive to fold and too specialised to replicate.