We Love Print, London. A Magazine Stall at Old Spitalfields Market
Nestled inside Old Spitalfields Market in East London, We Love Print is a curated magazine stall celebrating independent publishing, collectible print culture and the enduring craft of the printed page
We Love Print magazine stall in London
Old Spitalfields Market sits at the intersection of Liverpool Street and Shoreditch — one of East London’s most restless meeting points between commerce, creativity and independent culture. Beneath the market’s Victorian iron roof, vintage traders, food vendors, design stalls and international brands share space with smaller editorial and craft projects. Open seven days a week, it draws a diverse crowd: office workers, tourists, designers, students, collectors, and people drifting between galleries, studios and shops across the East End.
It is within this layered landscape that We Love Print took root — a magazine stall dedicated to independent publishing and the enduring culture of print. The project was launched by Ra & Olly, a family-run distribution company operating in the UK since the late 1960s, with deep connections across specialist magazine retailers, museums and bookstores.
Rather than functioning as a traditional newsstand, We Love Print positioned itself as a curated editorial space. Fashion titles sat beside architecture magazines, photography publications, travel journals, literary reviews and experimental independent projects. Established names shared shelves with small-run titles arriving from Europe, Japan and the United States — each chosen not simply for its content, but for the quality of its making.
James Laffar, who helped shape the project, described magazines as objects people want to keep rather than consume. “People really value a well-produced magazine as something they can keep and associate themselves with,” he told Lampoon. The emphasis fell not only on what a publication said, but on how it felt: the cover, the paper stock, the typography, the slow act of collecting issues over time.
Old Spitalfields Market and East London
Old Spitalfields Market traces its origins to the seventeenth century, when trading rights were granted on the site by the English Crown. The Victorian structure standing today dates largely to the nineteenth century, and survived the many transformations of the East End across the decades that followed. Through the twentieth century, the area was shaped by wholesale trade, waves of immigration, labor and manufacturing. After the fruit and vegetable market relocated in the early 1990s, Spitalfields gradually reinvented itself around retail, hospitality and the creative industries.
The streets surrounding Spitalfields — through Brick Lane and into Shoreditch — became one of the defining nodes of London’s creative economy. Independent shops, galleries, cafés, design studios and fashion labels spread across the neighborhood, while the market evolved into a hybrid environment: part commercial, part cultural, always in motion.
This context gave We Love Print a particular significance. The stall functioned less as a simple retail point and more as a piece of cultural infrastructure built around printed matter. Customers browsed slowly, debated covers, hunted for back issues and discovered new titles through conversation rather than algorithm.
Laffar also spoke of the long relationships at the core of magazine culture. Ra & Olly maintained ties with publishers, retailers and stockists across London and the UK — some stretching back generations. “My grandfather used to know a few of our clients back when he had bookstalls in the Sixties,” he said.
The work itself combined logistics, physical labor and editorial intuition. Mornings began with deliveries and time-sensitive distribution runs. The rest of the day moved between stores, publishers and conversations. Alongside distribution, Ra & Olly also worked informally with younger independent publishers — advising on presentation, positioning and the early development of new magazine concepts.
Print after the digital acceleration
The years following the pandemic accelerated digital media consumption at every level. And yet, within certain cultural sectors, they also deepened the value of print. Independent magazines survived not by competing on speed or scale, but by doubling down on the qualities unique to the physical object: tactility, slowness, careful sequencing and the pleasure of collecting.
We Love Print belongs to this evolution. The stall operates simultaneously as shop, archive, exhibition surface and meeting point. The publications it holds are not treated as disposable media, but as objects designed to last — to sit on a shelf, rest on a table, or find a permanent place in someone’s collection.
This sensibility runs through Old Spitalfields Market itself. Vintage dealers, record fairs, antique traders, independent makers and fashion stalls continue to coexist alongside larger retail brands and restaurants. The tension between permanence and transience remains part of the market’s character.
Within that environment, We Love Print represents something specific: a small stall built around magazines, and around the conversations, rituals and quiet persistence of print in an increasingly digital city.
We Love Print Old Spitalfields Market 16 Horner Square, London E1 6EW
