Among the everyday bustle of Leadenhall Market, discover secret stalls and pop-up performances where international artists invite you into playful exchanges: a story for a token, a taste for a memory, a conversation with a stranger.
Over two days, this free immersive marketplace transforms public spaces into moments of connection, where stories are traded, memories are shared, and small acts of encounter become the currency.
Created by Koro Lab artists, the event celebrates bold migrant voices and invites visitors to see the market - and each other - differently.
Practical details
Location: Across Leadenhall Market
Dates: • 18 September 2026 - 1-5pm • 19 September 2026 - 12-4pm
Tickets: Free, drop in
Full programme coming soon
Programme highlights
Munotida Chinyanga is an anti-disciplinary director and immersive performance maker creating socially engaged, audience-centred work that blends theatre, installation, and game structures.
Don’t Talk to Strangers, a participatory pop up café where goods are social risks. Disguised as familiar vendors, performers invite audiences to choose from a menu of interactions, and pay by exchanging memories, favours, confessions, or small acts of care.
Pepa Duarte is an actor, improviser, and theatre-maker working across participatory and socially engaged performance.
El Trueque is an interactive show that transforms a traditional market stall into a portal for memory and migration. Two actor-improvisers open an auction house that rejects money in favour of barter, where audience members are invited to "buy" valuable home objects in exchange of their own stories.
Devanshi Rungta is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance and community storytelling. The Price of Leaving asks: what do migrants carry that has no market value? Pop-up stalls are staffed by migrant performers selling the unmeasurable: a grandmother’s recipe, the smell of a city you can’t return to, a lullaby in a language your children don’t speak. Audience members receive tokens and spend them at stalls, entering intimate exchanges.
Project partners
Trading Stories is supported by Leadenhall Market, Theatre Deli, Arts Council England and The City of London Corporation’s Community Inspiring London Through Culture Fund.
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