School Marketplace

Every year budding food growers and entrepreneurs across London primary schools come and take part in our School Marketplace. 

Children from Traflagar Infant School selling their produce in 2017

The School Marketplace gives enthusiastic student entrepreneurs a chance to set up shop in the Map Area of City Hall. Together they creatively dress stalls to generate a lively market that showcases the efforts of their school gardens and food growing projects. The schools are rewarded for their hard work as regularly each walk away with between £100 and £200 in earnings.  

Three competitions are held throughout the day for Best Dressed Stall, Most Innovative Product, and People’s Choice. The schools go all out in decorating their stalls and in coming up with unique products to sell, which often makes choosing winners especially difficult.   This can range from lavender eye masks, herb dips with tortilla chips, confetti boxes with rose petals, summer jams, herb bunches, to herbal tea bags, tomato plants, salad bags and school jumper bags.

We have been stall holders for the last 3 years and it is always such an amazing event for our ‘young marketeers!’ All our 5-7 year olds at Trafalgar Infant School help out in our growing space and the Marketplace is a fantastic opportunity for them to see the full cycle of growing, cooking and preparing produce and then selling it. They then see that the money raised goes back into our growing space to help make us self-sufficient. It was an extra bonus this year to be awarded the People’s Choice for best stall. –Rachel Hutchins, Trafalgar Infant School

"The marketplace gave us a really good focus for our school gardening calendar and was a great way for the children to follow the growth of their plants to the table top. It really enthused them and helped to develop lots of additional skills, such as organisation, planning, costing, presentation, liaising with customers, managing sales which have really boosted their confidence. ” – Anna Hair, St Elizabeth Catholic Primary School

It's a fantastic event for everyone involved, so sign up now to take part as a food growing school, or come along on Friday 12 July 12-2pm to bag some delicious local produce and goodies from London schools!

The School Marketplace takes place in the map area on the lower ground floor at City Hall which is open to the general public.  

The School Marketplace will take place Friday 12th July 2019, and applications are now live, so please do join us as a food growing school, or come along to our next event to bag some delicious local produce!  Deadline is Friday 5th July 2019.