Elsie Adebayo counted the morning by the rhythm of canvas being pulled over poles. She had done it for twenty-three years, since her husband Joseph had died of the damp in their Bethnal Green flat and left her with a sewing machine and a bus pass. Her stall at Dunloe Street Market sold fabric — cottons from Manchester, silks that came through the docks, the odd bolt of wax print her sister sent from Lagos. At six-fifteen every morning except Sunday, she unlocked the shutter, pulled the canvas taut, and laid out the day's goods. The market woke around her: the baker at stall seven firing his ovens, the greengrocer at stall twelve hosing down his crates, the old pensioner Arthur Kemp shuffling to stall three with his cardboard box of second-hand paperbacks. By seven, the first customers arrived. By seven-thirty, the market was a living thing — a node in the web of Dunloe Street, connecting pensioners to their morning bread, young mothers to their vegetables, teenagers to their first jobs, council workers to their coffee. No one could have drawn a map of the connections. But when the wire snapped, everyone felt the current stop.

Jenny Mullins pushed the pram with her left hand and held four-year-old Keira with her right. The pram wasn't for a baby — it was for the shopping. Keira walked beside her, one hand on the pram handle, learning the route: past the launderette, left at the postbox, through the iron gate into Dunloe Street Market. Jenny had been coming here since she was Keira's age. Her mother had bought their Sunday meat from the butcher at stall fifteen. Now Jenny bought nappies from the chemist on the corner, fruit from the greengrocer, and once a fortnight a length of cotton from Mrs. Adebayo's stall to make Keira a dress. She did not think of the market as a place. She thought of it as the thing that held her week together — the place where she heard about Mrs. Chen's hip operation, where she learned that the rent on the flats behind the post office was going up, where she found out that the council was reviewing something, some proposal, she hadn't caught the details, but people were worried. Jenny was always worried about something. That was 1985. That was Bethnal Green. That was being twenty-seven with two children and a husband on the dole. The market was the one place where worry felt manageable because everyone else was worried too, and somehow that made it bearable.

At stall three, Arthur Kemp arranged his paperbacks with the care of a man who had once been a librarian and now was nothing in particular. He was seventy-four, and his hands shook in the mornings until he'd had his tea. The stall made him eleven pounds on a good week, which supplemented his pension by precisely enough to buy a hot meal three days out of seven. But Arthur did not come to the market for the money. He came because the market was the only place where people still called him Mr. Kemp. Where the young mother with the two children stopped and asked him what he was reading. Where the teenage boy who set up the stalls before school asked him about the war — the wrong war, the boy was always asking about the wrong war, but Arthur corrected him gently and the boy listened. Arthur had been a node in a different network once, a proper network, the kind with salaries and pension schemes and a staff Christmas party. That network had dissolved when the library closed in 1978, victim of the cuts, victim of a government that had decided places like Bethnal Green did not need librarians. Now Arthur was a node in the market network, and the market network was all he had left.

Dean Carter was sixteen and angry about almost everything. He was angry that his father had walked out when he was twelve. He was angry that his mother worked double shifts at the hospital and still couldn't make the rent. He was angry that the teachers at his comprehensive had stopped pretending he might pass his exams. But at five-thirty every morning, he was not angry. At five-thirty, he was useful. He unlocked the market gates with the key Mr. Donovan the fishmonger had given him two years ago. He helped Elsie Adebayo haul her bolts of fabric onto the stall. He swept the pavement in front of the baker's stall because the baker had a bad back. He carried boxes for Arthur Kemp because Arthur's hands shook. For two hours every morning, Dean was part of something. The ten pounds a week that the stallholders pooled together to pay him was not a wage — it was membership. Dean did not have the vocabulary to say this, but he felt it in his chest, a tightness that released when the market gates opened and the canvas went up and the first morning light hit the cobblestones. He was sixteen and angry, but the market made him something else, something he could not name.

Marjorie Holt had worked for Tower Hamlets Council for eleven years. She was forty-three, unmarried, and had a filing cabinet in her flat that was better organized than her emotional life. She liked her job. She liked the clarity of forms, the satisfaction of a properly completed report, the small power of knowing how things worked. When her supervisor handed her the Dunloe Street file in September 1985, she read it with the same attention she gave all her files. The market occupied prime development land. The council had entered into a partnership with a private developer. The proposal was for twenty-four luxury flats with ground-floor retail units. The market would be relocated to a site half a mile away, next to the gasworks, with reduced stalls and higher rents. The file called it "regeneration." The file called it "progress." The file had charts and projections and a foreword from the council leader about "bringing Bethnal Green into the modern era." Marjorie read the file twice. Then she typed up the consultation notices and put them in the post.

The notices arrived on a Tuesday. Elsie Adebayo read hers standing up, one hand on the stall counter, and felt something give way in her chest — not a heart attack, something quieter, the sensation of a rope going slack. Twenty-three years. The notice said the market would close in March. It said alternative arrangements would be made. It said a public consultation would be held. Elsie had seen consultations before. She had seen what happened to the launderette on Cable Street and the cobbler on Roman Road and the pub on Vallance Road where her Joseph had proposed to her in 1958. They closed. Something went up in their place — something with double glazing and a door entry system and prices that had nothing to do with the people who lived there. Elsie folded the notice and put it in her apron pocket and did not tell anyone until closing time, when the canvas came down and the stalls went dark and she sat on an upturned crate and wept.

The meeting was held in the community hall on a Thursday evening in October. All five of them were there — Elsie, Jenny with Keira on her lap, Arthur with his shaking hands folded on his walking stick, Dean standing at the back with his arms crossed, Marjorie sitting at the front table in her council blazer, taking minutes. The developer's representative was a man called Mr. Henshaw, who had a mustache and a soft voice and used words like "optimization" and "footfall analysis" and "regeneration uplift." He showed slides. The slides had graphs. The graphs showed growth. Elsie asked him what would happen to her stall. Mr. Henshaw said there would be space in the new development for "appropriate retail offerings." Elsie asked what that meant. Mr. Henshaw said the new development would prioritize businesses that "complemented the residential demographic." Jenny asked what that meant. Mr. Henshaw smiled. Arthur said, very quietly, "It means we aren't wanted." The room went silent. Dean uncrossed his arms. Marjorie Holt wrote "community concerns noted" in her minutes and felt something shift inside her — something that had been properly filed for eleven years and was now, for the first time, coming loose.

In November, the council sent the final notices. The market would close on the twenty-eighth of February. The relocation offer was withdrawn — there was no suitable site, the file said, but the council was "exploring options." Arthur Kemp read his notice at stall three, folded it into a precise square, and put it in his jacket pocket. He did not open his stall that morning. He sat on his chair and watched the market move around him — Elsie selling a length of blue cotton to a young woman, the baker handing a loaf to Jenny, Dean hauling crates — and he understood, with the clarity that comes to old men who have outlived their usefulness, that he was watching the last days of something. Not just the market. Something larger. A way of being together. He had been a librarian; he knew about networks. He knew that when you removed the central node, the connections did not simply find new routes — they dissolved. The pensioner who bought his bread at the market on Tuesday would not walk half a mile to the gasworks to buy it on Wednesday. The young mother with two children would not push her pram past the new flats with their private parking and their entryphones. The teenage boy would not find something useful to do at five-thirty in the morning, and his anger would have nowhere to go.

The last day of February was cold and wet. The stallholders packed their goods into cardboard boxes. Elsie folded her canvas for the final time. Dean helped her, not speaking, his jaw tight. Jenny came with Keira and stood in the empty space where the greengrocer's stall had been, trying to explain to a four-year-old why the market was going away. She could not find the words. Arthur Kemp did not come at all. He stayed in his damp flat on Vallance Road and stared at a paperback he had been meaning to read for thirty years and could not bring himself to open.

Marjorie Holt filed the closure report at four-fifteen that afternoon. The file was complete: consultation minutes, relocation assessment, developer agreement, final inspection. She put it in the cabinet under "D" for Dunloe Street and closed the drawer. She sat at her desk for a long time after that, looking at the closed drawer, thinking about the five people she had watched over six months — the fabric seller, the young mother, the old man, the boy, the version of herself that had typed the consultation notices without understanding what she was setting in motion. She had been the instrument of a process she now could not defend. She had been a node too, she realized — the node that delivered the current, that carried the signal, that transmitted the decision from the council chamber to the cobblestones of Dunloe Street. She had done her job. She had done it correctly. And something had been lost that she could not name and could not file and could not close.

By March, the connections were gone. Elsie Adebayo took a stall at the gasworks site, but only three of the old stallholders joined her, and the customers did not follow. Jenny Mullins started shopping at the supermarket on Mile End Road, where the vegetables were wrapped in plastic and no one asked about her mother's hip. Dean Carter stopped getting up at five-thirty. He stopped getting up before noon. By April, he had stopped leaving the flat altogether. Arthur Kemp died in June, alone, his paperback still unread. The cause was listed as heart failure, but the heart had failed long before June — it had failed on the last day of February, when the wire snapped and the current stopped and the network that had held him in the world simply ceased to exist.

Marjorie Holt resigned from the council in August. She gave no reason. She could not have articulated it if she had tried. She only knew that she could no longer open the filing cabinet without hearing Arthur Kemp's voice — "It means we aren't wanted" — and knowing that she had been the one who wrote it down, who filed it away, who closed the drawer and went home and made her tea and slept and got up and did it all again the next day, as if nothing had been lost, as if the network had not been a living thing, as if the connections between people did not matter as long as the file was complete.

The luxury flats on Dunloe Street were completed in 1987. They had double glazing and entryphones and a private car park. The ground-floor retail units remained empty for two years. No one who had shopped at the market could afford to shop there, and no one who could afford to live there wanted to buy their bread from a stall. The developer called it an "occupancy adjustment period." The council file was marked "closed." And in the damp flats of Bethnal Green, in the spaces where the market had been, five people who had once been connected to each other by a web of daily rituals and small kindnesses and the simple fact of proximity — five people who had been, for a time, a community — drifted apart, each carrying a piece of the broken circuit, none of them able to see the whole picture, none of them able to explain what had been lost, because the loss was not in any one of them. The loss was in the space between them. The loss was the network itself.