The nursery also functioned as a form of social centre for some of the parents who weren’t working but lived in poor conditions and were glad to get out of the house.

Market Nursery was a community nursery. They held parents' meetings once a month but found it difficult to get many of the parents involved to come. The meetings were also opportunities to get parents to come in at the weekend and help maintain the house which was ‘falling down about our ears’. In Not So Much a Nursery they wrote ‘It soon became obvious that only if we had parent support would the nursery keep going.’

At weekends parents maintained and improved the nursery building. They also fundraised together for a minibus which was used for trips and to take the children swimming.

The new nursery were aware that the council's social services budget was being cut. They decided to maintain pressure on the Council for the funding they needed: ‘We risked the Council taking a dislike of us – but they weren’t able to ignore us!’

On 1 April 1976 playgroup workers were given a pay rise. The nursery owed their workers backpay and the Council did not give them the money they needed, so ‘six of us descended on the Finance Officer to demand back pay’ and got the £300 payment they needed to cover it.

The next year they were being evicted from Dericote Street, and the GLC did not want to rehouse them. The nursery campaigned for a new building and went to the media. As a result, the GLC found them a property around the corner, in a large house that had previously been the Dean of Hackney’s residence.

They again applied for money to convert the building, but underestimated the costs involved, which meant they were short of funds for the building work they needed and again had to rely on volunteers. Two of the three workers disagreed with the decision taken by a majority of the parents to keep the nursery open during the move, when they would be without premises. An ‘uneasy compromise’ was reached when someone volunteered to go out with the third worker to take the children out every day, while the other two workers painted the nursery.

For the first year the nursery was run informally. Reflecting on the tensions that developed at the nursery while converting the new building, they wrote:

‘it became apparent to most of us, but not all, that we couldn’t run the nursery as if it were a group of friends – we needed organisation, a chain of responsibility and a more functioning democracy’.

Another issue that arose was whether parents or workers would have the final say on decisions; it was decided that workers should have the same decision making powers as parents, they could be voted onto the Committee but did not have an automatic right to sit on it.

In December 1977 Market Nursery teamed up with other community nurseries in Hackney to apply for joint funding, with the support of the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE). Despite this the Council dealt with each nursery separately and at first refused Market Nursery the funding to open for a full day. After the nursery campaigned against this decision the Council changed its mind a week later.

In its new premises the nursery had more space and gave each activity (painting, clay, lego, a slide and trampoline) its own room. The children could move around freely, and the nursery prioritised play over formal learning. They visited the library every fortnight and the swimming pool weekly, as well as often having outings to parks and museums, or visits to other nurseries. A speech therapist visited weekly, and the dentist came regularly.

The nursery also wanted to provide space for community activities. A Women’s Health Centre used the premises, two housing co-operatives met there regularly and they had evening parties and discos. ‘For many of us it has become the centre of our Social lives’ they wrote.

In school holidays they held a playscheme for older children, with funding for a playleader from the Inner London Education Authority and Urban Aid. The successful playschemes led to an organised holiday camping in South Wales after the playleader realised some of the parents felt guilty they could not afford to take their children away.

In 1978 Market Nursery was featured in the Hackney Flashers exhibition ‘Who is Holding the Baby?’ as an example of a community based solution to childcare issues. The exhibition made the point that community nurseries like Market Nursery were the exception rather than the rule.

Challenges around funding and parent participation continued in the 1980s.  Photographs of Market Nursery demonstrating at Hackney Council in the early 1980s show that pressure on the council for funding continued to be necessary. 

In the 1980s Market Nursery had a ‘special needs project’ for two disabled children. These children had their own worker assigned to them as it was recognised that more resources were needed to adequately support these children.

In their booklet, Not So Much A Nursery, Market Nursery advised other people who wanted to start a community nursery to make sure they had a properly elected committee with clear responsibilities. They also warned ‘it takes constant pressure on the council to survive, the more the better,’ and said ‘people won’t get involved if they have no control over what happens.’

They were still working on finding the right balance between parents and workers, and wanted to get pay parity established with the council nurseries to ensure they were not undercutting council nursery staff. In 1983 Market Nursery faced a significant crisis when a dispute emerged between two of its workers and the management committee and many of the parents.  The conflict attracted national media attention and divided opinion amongst Hackney's childcare activists and feminists.

Market Nursery continued until it was taken over by the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF) social enterprise nursery chain in 2019. It is now called London Fields Nursery and operates from the same location.