Market Hall - A Day in the Life
This is a journalistic ‘current history’ of life inside the love-it-or-hate-it Brutalist Market Hall building in Shrewsbury. It is a day-to-day record from inside the 1965 landmark, with reflections and opinions of the people there.
An observational essay with interviews and insights from some of 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 increasingly popular. There’s a real community inside, and it’s now a place to be.
Completed in 1965, it is filled with many lifestyles, from traditional fruit and veg merchants to butchers and 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.
