Durham Indoor Market

By the start of the nineteenth century the Market Place was over-run with stallholders and traders from around the area jostling for space.  Consequenlty City traders banded together with local businessmen to petition for both the building of a purpose built Market Hall and for a more organised running of the Markets.  In May 1851, The Durham Markets Company Act was passed for establishing new Markets and Market Places in the City of Durham, for abolishing the Corn Tolls and "for regulating the Markets and Fairs within the said City and Suburbs there-of and for other Purposes."


I've known the Market Hall from being a small schoolboy nearly 60 years ago.  To be honest it doesn't seem to have changed much!  It is of course cleaner and tidier but it's still a eclectic mix of trades, goods and stalls in hidden places.  I don't know if you get bargains there any more, and you wouldn't find much to do after a half an hour browse but it's worth a look in.  Inside, structurally is is much as it always was.

Nikolaus Pevsner describes it as"  "interior mostly with the usual cast-iron roof in a series of pitches on cast-iron columns, but stone vaulted at the north end. The back elevation, exposed to Leazes Road, has no Gothic pretences, just a massive retaining wall and plain segmental-headed windows under a row of gables".