The whelk stalls and aniseed balls that were such a part of my childhood are gone – and the wrecking ball will be moving in on the site of Sheffield’s improbably weird and lively institution
So, it’s really going to happen. By the time you read this, in fact, it may even have begun. In Sheffield, the wrecking ball will get to work on Castle Market. Its owner, the city council, has wanted rid for years – its members are never happier than when razing well-liked buildings to the ground – and in 2013 began the process by shifting stallholders to another site, a move that has not been, by any stretch of the imagination, an unmitigated success (footfall is down; rents have had to be discounted drastically). For those of us who loved this, the most singular market in Britain – it opened in 1965, another daring but slightly barmy Modernist project by the City architect, J Lewis Womersley, who also brought us Park Hill flats – the only hope now is that the tower that’s also part of the scheme might be saved via an emergency listing (this was designed by Andrew Derbyshire, one of the architects of New Zealand house in London, which is Grade II listed). A campaign has been launched to this end, and I hope and pray it succeeds. To pinch from Ian Nairn, it’ll be a diabolical shame if it doesn’t.
What can I tell you about Castle Market? As a child, it seemed to have come straight out of Hieronymous Bosch. The bustle, the mess, the noise. The smell of mackerel and bloodied sawdust. The cabbage leaves and broken biscuits underfoot. The Dr Who feeling that you’d travelled back in time, to a moment when snack bars, ladies’ girdles and hair salons with weekday deals on sets still reigned supreme. How, I used to worry, would I ever find my way out if I were to become separated from my father? (At a loss for suitable child-friendly entertainment, he took us there every Saturday we saw him.) The market’s multi-storeyed galleries, engineered for ease of movement, were linked by a system of walkways and curved ramps. But their logic, if it existed at all, was lost on me then, obscured as it was by the massed ranks of trolley-dragging old ladies in mushroom-shaped hats and fuzzy coats, the legions of red-faced men in stained white overalls and dripping chain-mail gloves.
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