Epsom's markets, and who each one suits
Epsom has four different places to shop, all within a few minutes' walk of each other, and each one suits a different kind of visitor.
| Where | When | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| General market, Market Place | Thursdays and Saturdays | People who come out of habit: regular shoppers, regular traders and anyone who knows what they came for. |
| Farmers' market, Market Place | First Sunday of the month | People on an outing, who decided in advance to come for fresh local food. |
| The Ashley Centre | Its own opening hours | Planned, weatherproof trips to familiar names, Marks and Spencer and Waitrose among them. |
| Food hall, Epsom Square | Longer hours than the markets | People coming for a meal or one favourite stall. It's closer to a hand-picked set of independents under one roof than to a street market. |
The general market rewards the trader who turns up every week and is known for one thing, which is how Castle Cary's Tuesday market works too. The farmers' market is the opposite, deliberately occasional, and a few miles away Surbiton's monthly farmers' market has run that way since 2009.
For the town, having all four is a kind of insurance, because a centre with only one of them bets everything on one kind of visitor. Epsom has somewhere for the planner, the regular, the day-tripper and the person who just wants lunch.
If you want a place to start, here are mine. In the Market Place, Seoul Food, a little Korean stall, does delicious food, and the people running it are lovely. Opposite, Organico, an organic grocery and café, is full of treats. On market days there's a wonderful array of flowers opposite the entrance to the shopping centre.
If you're taking a stall
Pick your day by the customer you want. A stall on a Thursday and a stall on the first Sunday reach almost entirely different people, even though they stand in the same square. That said, the table describes what each one is set up to do, not who actually turns up on the day. Nobody publishes how many people come on each market day, and if Go Epsom or the council ever does, I'll happily sharpen this up.
You'll find the market days on our page for businesses in Surrey and South West London, alongside Derby Day, which is a different kind of draw altogether.
I founded oXo Creatives, an independent marketing agency and consultancy, in 2013 and run it full-time. Until 2026 I ran it alongside senior in-house marketing roles at Google, PlayStation and King, partner management at Meta, and digital product at NatWest.
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