The Economist June 4th 2022 Britain 21Market hallsBeauty mixed with commerce
D
erby puton an impressive show at the
opening of its market hall in 1866. Visi-
tors to the city, some of whom arrived on
special trains, heard a performance of Han-
del’s Messiah and “a powerful and effective
organ”. Today the hall echoes with the
shouts of scaffolders. The rows of market
stalls on the ground floor are lifeless, the
traders having moved elsewhere. The
building will not reopen until 2024.
Even in its half-repaired state, Derby
Market Hall is spectacular. It has a vast roof
of glass and wood, with iron supports. It
looks a little like St Pancras Station in Lon-
don, which is not a surprise—the engineer
Rowland Mason Ordish worked on both.
Derby Council proudly expresses the com-
parison the other way around. St Pancras, it
says, “has a comparable splendour to the
roof of Derby Market Hall”.
The Midlands and north of England are
studded with Victorian market halls,
which are frequently among the grandest
buildings in their towns. Many are now be-
ing spruced up. Work is under way, or ex-
pected to begin soon, on market buildings
in Brighouse, Bury, Carlisle, Derby, Don-
caster, Goole, Lincoln, Newcastle and
Southport. Newport market in Wales re-
opened in March. In many places, the sin-
gle most tangible consequence of the gov-
ernment’s “levelling up” programme to re-
duce regional inequality is that something
is being done to the indoor market.
Market halls were one weapon in the
19th-century campaign against street trad-ers. People who hawked food from carts
and baskets were accused of obstructing
traffic, cheating shoppers and creating
noise and disorder. They were a “crying
evil”, as the burghers of Bolton put it. The
traders were swept from the streets and in-
to covered halls, where intense competi-
tion would in theory keep prices low. Few
halls were built in London or south-east
England. London was by the 19th century
far too large for centralised retail markets
to fulfil people’s needs.
Because every town wanted a more
spectacular market hall than its neigh-
bours, they became enormous and ornate.
They were orderly, at least in theory. Drunk
customers were barred. Wolverhampton
hired a market policeman to crack down on
loitering boys; a hall in Newton Abbot even
had a jail cell. In Leeds fruit-sellers were
reprimanded for their “habit of making a
great noise and wearing an objectionable
costume in front of their shops, causing
annoyance to the other tenants, and undu-
ly attracting customers”.
By the early 20th century attracting cus-
tomers, unduly or otherwise, was becom-
ing harder. Indoor markets faced stiff com-
petition from department stores, then
from supermarkets. Slum-clearance pro-
jects denuded city centres of inhabitants.
Derby’s planners decided that what the
place really needed was an inner ring road
that severed the city centre (and the market
hall) from residential districts. According
to “The British Market Hall”, a book byJames Schmiechen and Kenneth Carls,
more than 650 public-market buildings
have been constructed in Britain since- Only 24 were built after 1910.
Some market halls were pulled down
after the second world war; Bolton’s was
turned into a shopping centre. The others
carried on trading, often not terribly suc-
cessfully. In Doncaster, where the markets
occupy several linked buildings, the coun-
cil estimated in 2019 that they were losing
£600,000 ($750,000) a year. The grandest
building is the Corn Exchange—originally
a wholesale market where grain was sold
by sample but now occupied by retail trad-
ers. It is suffering from water damage, its
plasterwork crumbling away.
Sarah Wilson, who manages the Gentle-
man Fishmonger stall in Doncaster, re-
members the market being packed with
shoppers in the 1970s. Now many of the
traders are ageing, along with their cus-
tomers. Few show much interest in social
media, in home delivery or in long hours:
“Go to the butchers at two o’clock and all
the shutters are down,” she says. The mar-
ket seems stuck in time, selling old-fash-
ioned foods such as pork pies, Scotch eggs
and tripe. (None of this is true of Ms Wil-
son, an impressive entrepreneur who has
set up a restaurant counter and sells sushi.)
Boris Johnson’s government is now rid-
ing to the rescue. It has invited local au-
thorities that want to spruce things up to
bid for pots of money, dubbed the Future
High Streets Fund, the Levelling Up Fund
and the Towns Fund. The cash can be used
for many things but it should be spent by
2024, when the next general election is
likely to happen. Much of the money is go-
ing outside London and the south-east.
Local authorities have jumped at this as
a chance to repair their indoor markets.
They often own the halls and lease the
stalls, so it is in their interest to make them
more alluring. The buildings are generally
protected by law, but not nearly as strin-
gently as, say, cathedrals, so they can be al-
tered fairly quickly. Besides, “It’s sexier
than redoing the bus station,” says Emma
Forbes of Market Asset Management, a
property developer which runs the Don-
caster market, among others.
Many of the market halls will not be re-
stored to their old state. In Derby the large
fixed stalls are going, to be replaced by
small booths that can be moved aside to
stage events. There will be lots of seating,
more toilets and a bar on the mezzanine
level. The aim is to create a place where
people want to linger. “You can’t just have
people coming in for ten minutes,” says Si-
mon Riley of the city council. One model is
Doncaster’s Wool Market, which was reno-
vated in 2019. It now has fewer stalls, sever-
al excellent takeaways and crowds of punt-
ers in the evenings. The Victorians would
be appalled.
DERBY
Levelling up has been a boon for one particular type of buildingEat your heart out, St Pancras