London Farmers Market @ Riverside Market

Came across this on the LFM website:
New farmers market next to HMS Belfast Fridays - 9am to 3pm.

More info here:
https://www.lfm.org.uk/markets/riverside-market-se1/

Good luck to the traders!

Interesting, thanks. Why on earth these things are called 'Farmers' markets, I fail to see.

So called 'farmers markets', is a just a marketing trick. These often start off with some farmers / producers taking part, but then gradually evolve into yet another collection of street food vendors (take the one on Tuesdays on the Guys / Kings campus). There's more of a market for the ready made than for produce to take home and cook. Just look at the way Borough Market has evolved into a venue for '50 ways to scoff slop on the hoof', and the explosion in the volume of take away meals consumed, serviced by the plague of delivery riders.

Looking at the cast list of this latest lfm run site, there are only a small proportion of 'farms' involved, and most of those also offer 'cooked local foods', from which they'll make a far better margin at £6-7 or more a serving than their raw produce.

There's no 'marketing trick'.
Our emphasis over the last 20 years has been to run farmers markets. Some of our midweek markets evolved into more hot food/lunch markets because customers weren't interested in buying raw produce. Our Thursday market at Bloomsbury still has plenty of fresh fruit, vegetables, bread, juice, eggs, butter, cream, milk and more.
London Bridge started off the same way but has evolved into a lunch market. If you notice the signs they now say lunch market. We still have the same strict rules about ingredients and provenance.
At London Bridge Riverside we were asked to provide some raw produce which we've done.

That's all well and good and I don't have a problem with these food markets, but calling them 'farmers' markets makes no sense to me. Would I be right in thinking the term originated in America?

As a bloke who grew up in an English market town, I would call the place where people sell fresh produce from temporary stalls a 'market'.

In my very early youth I sometimes went to the cattle market and watched farmers trade cows with each other: that's a farmers market. There are farmers there.