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.
Our routine was always the same: a precision raid, two stops. First, the meat market. “Lovely FRESH pipe and bag!” the signs used to say, as if there was every possibility it might not be (fresh, that is) elsewhere. Pipe was a euphemism for intestines, and bag meant stomach, and both would be draped palely across the stalls like something recently washed up on a beach. If you looked down, you’d often see a bucket of cow heels as well, though I tried hard not to. But in any case, we were just scooting by on our way to the fish stalls, so much more genteel, the stock piled tidily at the back and pride of place at the front given to row upon row of tiny ceramic plates in dolly mixture colours. Each one held three fat whelks, half a dozen prawns, a little mound of cockles or winkles. They came from Bridlington. You paid per plate, and ate the contents standing up, while the fishmonger chatted to you, stacked the empties, and replenished the gaps. Wimpish, I would eat prawns. My father, needing to appear manly, as Dr Scholl-wearing university lecturers are occasionally wont to do, ate whelks, after which we would proceed directly to stop number two, a sweet stall that sold “real” aniseed balls. We were fundamentalist about aniseed balls: no dusty seeds, no return custom.
Farmers’ markets: when you think about it, they’ve a lot to answer for, haven’t they? I’m not saying that I’m against them, per se; it would be a bit loopy for a person like me to take a stand against heritage tomatoes and gluten-free brownies, however tedious these things have become (answer: very). All the same, councils hellbent on so-called regeneration increasingly seem to want all their markets to be goat’s cheese-based, and to hell with the fact that a) goat’s cheese is expensive, relatively speaking and b) some people have a greater need for a cheap source of (non-heritage) carrots and Tunnock’s tea cakes than for goat’s cheese, however delightful it may look when rolled in ash. It’s hardly their fault, but farmers’ markets have become yet another sign of the blandification of our towns, a process that is incapable of encompassing the parochial liveliness – the sheer weirdness and improbability – of an institution like Castle Market. In its place, by the way, the council wants to put a park. I predict kiosks selling fair trade coffee, “handmade” ice cream and half-arsed noodles with a price tag to make Sheffield eyes pop.
