The first time Omar Aljabareen opened his Jerusalem Falafel stall on Berwick Street market in Soho, he sold one wrap all day. “I was alone in my gazebo; I used to go out in the street to offer people a taste,” he recalls. “It was really hard to build up a business – I suffered a lot.”

Five years on, the stall employs six people behind the counter, one of whom is stretching dough over a cushion while five more pass the wraps along adding salad, vegetables, tahini sauce. Aljabareen, a 34-year-old Palestinian who studied biotechnology as a postgraduate before moving to the UK, sells around 250 wraps a day, mostly to a queue of office workers plus a handful of residents and tourists exploring the backstreets of London’s West End.

But while Jerusalem Falafel is thriving, Berwick Street market – once a traditional street market selling food and household goods; now a hybrid composed of relics of this plus a handful of hot food stalls – is under threat. Indeed, the day I met Aljabareen could have been his last day trading here – it was the expiry date on the temporary licence under which most of the stallholders operate, and for which they pay £350 a month.

Westminster city council wants to “privatise” the market by bringing in a commercial operator as the stallholders’ landlord, following a tendering process that opened last week. The traders have responded by launching a campaign to “keep Berwick Street Market independent”; they fear that as rents go up, the market – which dates back to the 18th century, and in its 1920s heyday was home to 150 stalls – will be transformed, and the street will lose its distinctive identity as longstanding independent businesses are replaced by coffee bars and retail chains.

West End councillor and former Soho resident Glenys Roberts is a Westminster Conservative, but is on the campaigners’ side. She believes the council’s timing is wrong, and that there is more at stake on Berwick Street than the future of the 20-or-so market traders currently based here.

“The land is obviously worth a fortune and people want to maximise it, so it’s a fight between that philosophy and the people who remember the old Soho,” Roberts says. “Berwick Street is a sort of metaphor for the battle of the soul of Soho: will its rather nice, scruffy creativity be able to survive, or will it all get so sanitised that it won’t be worth going?”

Last month the traders were granted an extension, with their temporary licences renewed until next year. But to Aljabareen, the delay simply feels like a stay of execution. “When they take the pitch from me, what am I going to do?” he asks. “My life is based on this. If the new market operator won’t give me a lease for at least five years, I can’t see a future. All my efforts will have been for nothing.”

His neighbouring stallholder Sam Coe feels similarly threatened. Now 34, Coe – whose 81-year-old granddad is here to help out – has worked on Berwick Street since he was 16, starting in That’s Andy hardware store before moving into the market when that business closed.

Coe sets up at 7am six days a week on the cobbled, pedestrianised section of the road that runs south from Oxford Street towards Shaftesbury Avenue. But building works that have seen the row of shops behind the market boarded up for redevelopment have damaged his business. “Yesterday was the worst day ever – I don’t think I took £75,” he says. “You might as well be on a battlefield when the drilling starts; it’s like a tank driving past.”

New shops, flats and a Premier Inn are due to open underneath Kemp House, the 1960s council block that was once home to Soho raconteur Jeffrey Bernard, but Coe believes privatisation will lead to rents going up – some suggest as much as 400% – attracting high-street names while driving traditional street traders like him away.

“If people are going to come in and charge £100 a day for a pitch then it’s goodbye to my business,” he says. “I’m very angry, to be honest. Soho was always separate from Oxford and Regent Streets – it was where you went if you wanted something different, a bit of quirkiness. But now they’re moulding it into the same as everywhere else.”

Further up the road, Laecia Stannett is wrapping roses in cellophane behind the flower stall her brother Mark inherited from their father. Now 51, she has been coming to Berwick Street since the 1970s and because her brother, along with some fruit sellers, is one of a handful of permanent licencees, their position is more secure.

But they too have joined the Berwick Street traders’ group whose petition against privatisation is propped up on the Soho Dairy stall, because they fear rising costs. After outgoings including their share of the rental of a storage shed, and the barrow itself, Mark Stannett says he is lucky to clear £200 a week: “It’s hard, it’s very hard, but it’s better than sitting around at home doing nothing.”

“I love this market, I love Soho, and they’re going to make it like every other street in London,” Laecia adds. “That’s what’s sad – it’s our little village.”

Robin Smith of Soho Dairy chairs a newly formed Berwick Street Traders Society, and is leading fundraising efforts to get the market listed by Westminster council as an asset of community value. He believes if the plans are not halted, “we’re heading for a grotesque, departure-lounge retail scenario”. Theatre director Bob Carlton, a resident, says the area “has always changed, but now it’s being changed by corporations that don’t know what Soho is”. When Crossrail is built, he fears the neighbourhood “will become just a terminus, not a place as it is now”.

But not everyone on Berwick Street shares this sense of impending doom. In Borovick Fabrics, one of the oldest shops in the area – with its rolls of pink vinyl and gold and silver lamé in the doorway – Brian Berg says that while he understands traders’ nerves, he is optimistic about the impending developments.

Berg, who has worked in Soho since 1972 and used to run the market association, thinks the street looks “a bit old-fashioned and needs some named shops other than coffee houses” – and says he is glad that Paperchase will soon be the first big chain store to open here. There again, he’s been hoping for improvements to Berwick Street for the past 40 years.

The current issue of the Soho Clarion, quarterly newsletter of the long-established Soho Society, declares that traders who have struggled on through the building works “deserve medals” and must be treated fairly – but adds that change “could very much be change for the better” and offers support for Westminster’s plans.

“A certain amount of bigger businesses is good,” concedes Nick Hawker, the 33-year-old co-owner of Soho Bikes, pointing out Sandqvist, the smart Swedish bag shop over the road. But, he adds, “that model is not something we can compete with as a single store” – so a balance must be struck. Hawker is a tenant of Shaftesbury, the FTSE 250-listed West End property company which owns around 30 buildings here and is one of the key stakeholders in the dispute.

The petition to keep Berwick Street market independent is addressed to Westminster city council, where Daniel Astaire is cabinet member for business and regeneration with responsibility for markets. Astaire says any suggestion that the market in its current form is being set up to fail is “cynical and unfair – I’m incredibly supportive of street trading”.

Berwick Street’s decline is long-term, in line with other traditional street markets. Whereas 20 years ago there were two rows of up to 50 stalls selling fish, meat, fruit and vegetables, plus assorted household goods and clothing, today there are as few as a dozen on a quiet day.

Campaigners have long called for new investment (five years ago, as a London Green party activist, I joined them), and last year the Conservative council resurfaced the road and installed electricity points. Yet despite these improvements, Astaire believes the market is “failing at the moment. I have been wrestling with ideas to try to give it life and blood and vitality.”

His solution is to turn the market over to a commercial operator. Astaire acknowledges that people want different things from Berwick Street: while residents and local restaurants are generally supportive of the traditional flower and fruit stalls, others might prefer more hot food and the higher margins that go with this. He believes an experienced operator can deliver both, adding that the council is not looking for a profit; the market only needs to “wash its face”.

A “local partnership board” is written into the tender document, with the initial deal for a pilot project lasting a year. The point, according to Astaire, is to encourage “aspiration and enterprise” – he highlights Pizza Pilgrims, once a stall and now a pair of West End pizzerias, as an example of what can be achieved.

But some locals, along with the Save Soho campaign co-founded by Stephen Fry in 2014 when the closure of nearby nightclub Madame Jojo’s was announced, believes Soho’s artistic heritage is threatened, and that short-term profit for property owners could come at too high a price. Councillor Roberts calls for the battle to preserve Berwick’s idiosyncratic retail mix, and fight off the branded tents of a multinational operator, “Soho’s last stand”. She also disputes Astaire’s description of the market as a failure.

“I have a certain sympathy with the ad hoc market they’ve got there at the minute; it’s not all streamlined and that’s the charm of it,” Roberts says. “Developers and landowners seem to think a market is better defined as an outdoor Waitrose. Now there’s nothing wrong with Waitrose, but I don’t want all my food wrapped in cling film.”

The councillor warns that if the redevelopment scheme goes ahead, given the challenges including lack of storage and parking, it is possible the market could be dead within three years. But timing tops her list of concerns: if the current group of traders are given one year after the completion of the building works to make a go of the market, Roberts says she would then be open to privatisation if they fail to bring it off.

Astaire suggests one solution might be for the traders to put in their own bid through the tender process, and says “they’ve got as much chance as anyone else”, but others question whether they have the necessary expertise.

The reinvention of markets

Across Europe, the average age of a market shopper is 65, and the generational issue is relevant when considering opening hours. While traditional street markets have always opened from early morning until mid-afternoon, many people don’t decide until finishing work in the evening what they are going to eat.

Some operators, whether companies or councils, are now experimenting with night markets, or specialising in food, antiques and fashion on different days. “The traditional street market offer does struggle, but the reinvention of markets has got to be done in a curated way,” says markets campaigner Ellie Gill. “We need to be more competitive, start adapting and not be afraid [of change].”

Simon Quayle, a director at Shaftesbury, says a different market on weekdays and at weekends could be one solution. Berwick Street is one of five key neighbourhoods for Shaftesbury, along with Covent Garden and the Carnaby Street area, but it is far from the only landlord here.

The redevelopment of 90-104 Berwick Street is by PMB Holdings, while Soho Estates – the company built up by strip club owner Paul Raymond – is behind the controversial Walker’s Court scheme, with new clubs and offices being built alongside a revamped Madame Jojo’s in the alley that connects Berwick Street with Shaftesbury Avenue.

Critics describe the cumulative impact of such schemes as “devastating blandification”, but Quayle says any suggestion the street will become an Oxford Street extension is false. Critics of the changes around Carnaby Street, he says, “look at things with rose-tinted glasses, and forget it was full of tourist tat”.

Shaftesbury tenants on Berwick Street include independent music shops Reckless Records and Sister Ray, and Quayle says his company values its musical heritage – Berwick Street is on the cover of Oasis’s 1995 album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? – pointing to its support for the annual Record Store Day. But rents, he agrees, will go up.

Anna Boyle of So High Soho is another trader who is holding on, despite her frustrations. When the fancy dress shop she co-owns was closed as part of the Kemp House development, she moved into two smaller shops over the road. Sitting on a stool in her changing rooms, she says development is inevitable, and Record Store Day is a “good and exciting” initiative. But she believes the council is alarmingly out of touch with the retailers over whose fates it has so much control.

“I know it’s difficult liaising with communities and change causes upset, but in this business solving problems is what we do every day,” Boyle says. “I’m not opposed to everything; it’s just that it has to be done in the right way. If the council hadn’t made so many obvious blunders then I’d feel empathy, but you end up feeling it’s deliberate when you’re given three days to send feedback in a consultation exercise.”

Her business, she says, has never been tougher, and where a serious attempt at research might involve 100 questions, Boyle suggests Westminster only wants to tick just three boxes: “Is it easy? Is it modern? Is it different?”

Echoing a report produced for London mayor Boris Johnson in 2010, which pointed to the social as well as economic benefits of markets, Boyle says the “value of the market is in the atmosphere it brings. It’s like a pause in the common space where people touch base and connect. Sometimes I think the council is scared of that.”

Since cities are not museums, there is always a balance between old and new – but Boyle’s fear, shared with others, is that the neighbourhood could become a retail theme park.

Right now, she would like to see an artist try to capture something of its history, or a Berwick Street Market festival. “It’s very difficult to know what value nostalgia has,” she says. “I’d say it’s the closest you’ll get to time-travelling.”

Westminster County Council is holding a consultation meeting at 6pm today at the Chinese Community Centre, 2 Leicester Court, London WC2. There is also a public meeting scheduled for Tuesday 6 September