Romford Market has been running since 1247, when Henry III ordered a Wednesday market established at Romford — it began as a sheep and livestock market and grew into the commercial heart of the town. Almost eight hundred years later it is still one of the largest street markets in the south east, with around 150 stalls trading every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

That continuity is worth photographing in itself: this is not a revival or a food-hall reinvention but an unbroken working institution. The card's observation is the key to the atmosphere — this is a functional, working-class market that does not care whether you photograph it or not. That indifference is photographic freedom. Nobody performs, nobody poses, and nobody minds.

The traders are the picture. Market trading is a performance craft — the calling, the patter, the theatrical bagging of fruit — and Romford's traders are professionals of it. Pick a strong stall, stay ten minutes, and let the exchanges come to you rather than drifting constantly.

The compression is the composition. On busy Saturdays the aisles pack tight, and long-lens frames down the stall rows stack people, produce and canopies into dense layers. Work at 50mm-equivalent or longer for the compression, or go wide and close inside the crowd at f/8 with zone focus.

The goods tell the story. A market's stock is a portrait of its customers: the mix of clothing, household goods, food and phone accessories maps the whole community. Still-life frames of stalls belong in the same set as the people.

Timing: arrive for setup if you can (vans, trolleys, tarpaulins, tea), work the mid-morning peak, and stay for pack-down, when the market empties and the frames turn quiet — crushed boxes, last customers, traders counting out.

London's famous markets — Borough, Columbia Road, Portobello — are photographed continuously, mostly by visitors, mostly identically. Romford is not, which means the same effort produces rarer work. A patient, respectful body of work from a market like this documents something the famous markets no longer show: ordinary commerce for ordinary customers, unchanged in function since the thirteenth century.

The working method matters accordingly: this is a market of regulars, so behave like one. Buy things, talk to people, come back. The difference between a tourist with a camera and a photographer the traders recognise is about three visits — and it shows in the pictures.