Market Hall - A Day in the Life

A journalistic ‘current history’ of life inside the love-it-or-hate-it Brutalist Market Hall building in Shrewsbury. A record of the day-to-day from inside the 1965 landmark with reflections and opinions of the people in there.

An observational essay with interviews and insights from the wide variety of tenants backed up with candid images of their everyday goings-on.

Over the last few years, the Market Hall in Shrewsbury has become ever more popular; there’s a real community inside, and it’s now a place to be.

Completed in 1965, it is filled with a wide range of lifestyles, from traditional fruit and veg merchants, butchers, florists; many have traded there for over 30 years.

Some see the building as an eyesore intruding on the surrounding architectural mix of much loved Mediaeval, Georgian and Victorian buildings. Others love it because of this contrast and its individuality.

New traders have set up alongside; a coffeehouse, traditional barbers, organic wine merchants, and even artists’ studios.

We wanted the design to be dripping with references to the Pevsver synopsis; “clean lines and simple forms…vertical black fins in an echo of close studding”.

The strong, clean vertical lines on the façade are brought to the layout using narrow full-length columns, stark white space, and the Compacta typeface from 1963. Its industrial appearance, a popular genre in the early 1960s, was used throughout.