A Sunday market runs on improvisation. Traders call out, crowds press in, and the whole thing plays out like street theatre — spontaneous, funny, and intensely visual. That is the premise of *Market Day*, Paul Trevor’s collection of photographs made in London’s markets, published by Hoxton Mini Press in 2024.

Trevor is a self-taught photographer who spent years through the 1970s and 1980s among the stalls, and his pictures have been exhibited internationally since 1970. His subject is the transaction and everything around it: the patter, the haggling, the faces half-turned toward a camera they may not have noticed. What holds the sequence together is a contrast — the noisy energy of buying and selling set against an East End that had not yet been gentrified, its shopfronts and terraces still run-down.

The tone is not solemn. These photographs are humorous and warm, and they carry a social impulse rather than a thesis: a city observed at close range. Library catalogues file the book under street photography and London markets, which is accurate but undersells how much of the pleasure here is comic.

Physically it is a compact hardcover of 124 pages, roughly twenty centimetres tall and seventeen wide — a format that suits pictures meant to be held and read close rather than displayed. For a collector, the case for *Market Day* is straightforward: a sustained body of work on a subject with a clear historical boundary, the market life of a district photographed before its character changed, gathered into a single, well-made volume.