Mary Braid: The battle for space in the city

Nostalgia floods the Golden Heart pub on one corner of Spitalfields Market in London's East End. Sinatra, backed by a gorgeous swinging big band sound, is on the jukebox. "Summer Wind", I insist to a pub regular, Michael Myers, is the best Sinatra song of all time. Mr Myers, who has lived his entire 72 years in Spitalfields, opens his mouth and sings the first few bars.

And by God, he's good. If I closed my eyes, he might be Frank. A former barber who drives a black cab part-time, Michael is also a semi-professional Sinatra performer. "When I cross the market, people shout out Frank to me," he says, proudly. "That's because people know me round here."

Spitalfields, home in turn to waves of Irish, Jewish, Huguenot and Bengali migrants over the centuries, is that kind of community, a little rough around the edges but close and quirky. Over the last decade it has undergone something of a renaissance. Its run-down Georgian houses have been bought up for peanuts and tarted up, and it's become a place where the trendy hang out.

But Spitalfields is now under threat, for it sits on the edge of the City, London's mighty financial centre. The City's glass tower blocks hang over it like a cliff and a banner just a few streets from the Golden Heart welcomes businessmen from across the globe to "the financial capital of Europe", a position the City and its local authority, the Corporation of London, are determined to maintain through expansion in the only direction possible, east. The City also needs to expand to stem the relocation of corporate giants and international banks to Canary Wharf, the upstart business centre, booming several more miles away to the east.

Spitalfields Market, built in 1890 and extended in 1928, is by inner-city terms a huge open space, covered by a glass and steel roof and enclosed on four sides by low-build red brick. Until the late 1980s it was home to a vegetable and fruit market, before the City of London relocated the market and sold the site to developers. As an interim measure, while it honed plans for new office blocks, the developers Spitalfields Development Group (SDG) started a Sunday market at the site, with stalls offering everything from organic food to tarot readings. The irony is that the interim market was such a huge success that it was seized upon by opponents to City encroachment as a much better option for Spitalfields than more office blocks.

Spitalfields Market Under Threat (Smut) is supported by organisations as disparate as the East London Mosque, the local Georgian house-owners' association, the local community council and prominent individuals such as Sir Terence Conran, Tracey Emin and Gilbert and George. And the battle between it and the City, the Corporation of London and SDG grows ever more bitter.

Two-fifths of the market – built in 1890, listed and, therefore, protected – is now in the hands of Ballymore developers who are promising to preserve a reduced stall market in their new commercial development. But by Christmas, the bulldozers could well have moved in to demolish the three-fifths of Spitalfields market not listed and therefore not protected. Mr Myers cannot believe that the plan to wipe out the open space and put up tower blocks is going ahead. "SDG has all these posters up trumpeting regeneration," he says. "It should be degeneration."

Sandra Esqulent, the Golden Heart's glamorous East End landlady, is just as furious. When the fruit market closed, her pub takings slumped. "People thought I was mad to stay here," she says. "But I just love this place. When young people started moving into the market in the 1990s to set up stalls and small businesses on short leases I was really impressed with them. They weren't from the East End, but they seemed to have East End spirit. But they've been forced out now. They aren't just destroying a unique area, but people too."

On Friday, Smut took its campaign to the heart of the City where members unfurled a "Don't Demolish Neighbourhood Assets" banner outside the Bank of England, where the Corporation of London was hosting a debate on East End regeneration. Some in the City dismiss Smut as the "bead and bangle brigade", but only one supporter – a woman in a tea-cosy hat who wants the small protest group to take the Bank of England by force – satisfies that prejudice. Mr Myers and Mrs Esqulent would not have qualified as members of the brigade and neither would the 16 or so ordinary-looking supporters outside the bank. And particularly not the only one dressed in a black pin-striped suit.

"Everyone keeps asking if I'm dressed up just for the protest," says an offended Ralph Smyth, 25, a barrister who lives a five-minute bike run from Spitalfields. "That's what people keep asking. I have plenty of friends in professional jobs who are aghast at the plans for Spitalfields. There is no other place like it, but if offices are built rents will go up and the area will become homogenised because only big companies will be able to afford to do business there. You just get consumer monoculture."

As well as pin-striped man, the protest group boasts a man in a dog collar. And he isn't dressed up either. The Reverend William Taylor, a handsome, improbably young-looking 36-year-old, was sent to Spitalfields by the Bishop of Oxford in the 1980s to learn some "humility" before starting his vocation. Smut is obviously a broad church. Mr Myers and Mrs Esqulent could be extras from My Fair Lady. Reverend Taylor is even posher that Mr Smyth.

The Reverend knows all Spitalfields' faces. He worked in the fruit market before it folded, taught the local Imam English and even did some community consultation for SDG before joining the opposition. He published a book earlier this year arguing for the preservation of Spitalfields as a public space. He is fed up with planning orthodoxy, in which inner city "brownfield" sites must be developed so greenfield sites can be protected. It fails, he says, to address the question of open public spaces in cities.

He can talk secular city planning with the best of them but he also has a nice Biblical take on the City creeping in on Spitalfields. "St Paul talked about regeneration and meant your relationship with God and your fellow human beings," he says. "It was to do with giving life shape and meaning. Public space is important in that it allows people to come together and exchange stories."

Back at Spitalfields Market, at least one pub owner says he is looking forward to the arrival of thousands of new office workers, who will improve business. It is true that in Spitalfields, opponents and supporters don't divide neatly in terms of accents, class, jobs and clothes. The battle over the space seems to go to the heart of how we feel about life – about what kind of world we want to live in. "Surely not everything can just be about money?" asks Mrs Esqulent. By Christmas, she may have an answer to her question.