The British Market Hall: A Social and Architectural History (review)

The dust jacket blurb on Market Hall describes it as “a tale of exuberant architecture, civic pride, and attempts at social engineering”. While such heady claims for such edifices may test one’s credulity, they may as easily elicit curiosity. It is just as well, for this account of the Victorians’ formation of urban space—their reasons for doing, how they did it, and what they accomplished—is intriguing in every respect. It is at once a superlative example of interdisciplinary scholarship—one which relates both the spatial and aesthetic dimensions of architecture and social history and an informative and highly readable adventure for its reader.

Although the open-air market had become by the eighteenth century a mainstay in the English town, its being was challenged by inefficiency and filth: the country’s dependence upon such a disorganized and dirty environment for food distribution proved risky, inviting hardship and even unrest in times of scarcity. The solution to this grubby situation was the invention of a covered market, which proved remarkably functional and aesthetically attractive to the urban landscape. In time it became quite as much a monument to Victorian England as the railroad hotel and the seaside spa while its symbolic relationship with virtue and social ideals superseded both.

Schmiechen and Carls focus on the period after 1750 when the local market adjusted to the demands of the new consumer culture. Earlier concerns about regulating the market and restricting the activities of unscrupulous middle men gave way to providing amenities for a newly affluent middle class. That the market hall in its efficiency, cleanliness, aesthetic, and high moral tone enhanced this process made it a creature par excellence of this consumer revolution.

In their introduction—“Food, Markets, and History”—the authors broadly sketch their subject. They touch variously on the crisis state of food storage and distribution after 1750, the nature, history, and shortcomings of open-air markets as well as the corrective offered by enclosed ones, and the linkage between food distribution and an improved diet for a surging urban populace. The arguments of social and moral reformers—that anti-social behavior could better be curbed in an enclosed market environment—are noted as are those by architects who contemplated improving the urban aesthetic by rearranging public space and changing building styles. These diverse themes are cogently organized and detailed in eleven separate chapters which fall under four headings—“Urban Space and the Reinvention of the Public Market”, “The Architecture and Design of the Public Market”, “The Market Hall and Socioeconomic Change”, and “Decline and Recovery”.

The authors’ treatment of market hall design and the planning of public space is especially well conceived and described. Relating these matters to late eighteenth-century societal change and middle class resolve of what the street and market ought to be, they conclude that the rational and respectable became the determinants of the new environment. Their observation that “central to this view was an old notion, newly resurrected, that the proper arrangement of the townscape could correct human behavior and thus create a better (and safer) society” [p. 21 ] is key both in the specifics examined here and in understanding Enlightenment mentalité, generally. Part and parcel of integrating an ordered physical environment with civic virtue was prevalence of public order, achieved not only through a police establishment but with adequate lighting and paving as well. A market which confirmed these same principles of order would, it was argued, serve as a counter force to the health hazards of disorderly outdoor markets. Of course, such intended changes represented a reversal of the historic claim by the city’s poor to the streets and market.

Schmiechen’s and Carls’ method, which nicely combines analysis with chronological narrative, also evokes market hall imagery. In their heyday, between 1830–90, halls gleamed with glass and polychromatic brick, polished brass, wood paneling, varnished oak and red deal stalls...