Bringing historic market halls back to life

Retrofitting buildings and spaces has a vitally important role to play in a wider placemaking context and is crucial for reducing embodied carbon in the built environment, writes Richard Dowdall of Civic Engineers.

This is something the team at Civic is excited to discuss further at UKREiiF in May.

The retrofitting drive is evident within the wave of recent projects that are bringing historic market halls in town and city centres across the UK back to life.

In recent years, there has been a notable uptick in local authorities and developers’ ambitions to return old market halls to their former glory for the benefit of local people and businesses.

While this growing momentum offers up many positives, the rich history of market halls can present a hidden world of unknowns, structural challenges, and complexities for design teams to navigate, which in turn call for innovative and collaborative approaches.

The evolution of the UK’s historic market halls

Since the mid-1900s, dozens of Victorian market halls have been demolished amid fears they would be too costly to modernise, or instead converted into council chambers that were no longer intended for use by the public.

But since the pandemic, we have witnessed a turning point. There is a growing sentiment that these structures can be put to better use to help revitalise the high street, boost footfall, and support the local economy.

There are many positive examples to be found, particularly across the North. In Accrington, the town’s listed Victorian Market Hall is being restored with plans for it to become a food and drink venue as part of a major regeneration of the wider town square. In Middlesbrough, our team is working on the plans to revitalise the 19^th-century town hall, one of the town’s oldest buildings, which has stood empty for decades. And in Doncaster, crowds of people flocked to the recent opening of the revamped Grade II-listed Corn Exchange, another of our projects, which will now operate as an events space for the community.

Elsewhere, Manchester’s landmark Upper and Lower Campfield Market are set to be transformed by Allied London after the project secured Levelling Up Funding in 2021. Once home to an indoor cheese and vegetable market in the 1800s, before latterly housing the Science and Industry Museum’s Air and Space installation, Campfield Market is a site with huge historical and sentimental significance in the region.

Navigating hidden complexities

Quite often, when we peel back the layers of a project, multiple challenges will emerge.

Many of the listed structures that have been repurposed to house the likes of council chambers have not always been maintained to a high standard and often have fallen into disrepair as local authorities’ budgets have tightened. It’s not uncommon to find roofs that have been leaking for decades or fire damage, which has gone untreated. What might first appear as a limited aesthetic issue may in fact disguise significant damage to a building’s structural fabric, and original material and features.

Construction budgets can be blown out of the water because an initial cost appraisal or viability statement doesn’t account for all the unknowns that are tucked away. It’s a real challenge to put enough contingency into a pre-development cost plan – often an overly risk averse approach renders the project unfeasible from the outset.

The planning process, and getting the buy-in of local authorities, can also pose hurdles. As with any historic or listed building, there are a lot of protections in place that are there for good reason, but they can make the construction process more challenging and draw out timeframes.

Bringing design teams together that have experience of working closely with local authorities as well as knowledge of working with historic assets can go a long way to making plans viable from the outset.

It’s also key to assemble cross-discipline teams, including transport consultants, at the earliest opportunity. When market halls were originally constructed, they didn’t need to meet the planning requirements of today and many lack modern infrastructure, such as access points or space for refuse collections. Building detailed strategies that incorporate provisions for these factors and long-term maintenance is vital.

Consider reuse wherever possible

There’s often a perception that materials or structures are not fit for purpose, but there are many creative ways we can reuse and restore them that might not be immediately obvious, as we have at Manchester’s Mayfield Park, where we have reused historic cast iron beams of the river’s 120-year-old culvert for various new bridges within the park.

At Campfield Market, we’re repurposing old floorboards to form the walls and partitions, as well as historic steelwork as part of the public realm. We also carried out significant detailed analysis to allow us to retain the original substructures to support the new internal mezzanine floors. We have also created a non-intrusive mezzanine floorspace that isn’t attached to the existing frames of the building. This has reduced the impact on the historical fabric of the building and means that future usage can be easily adapted when needed, without leaving scars or impacting the original listed building fabric.

We urgently need to prioritise low carbon design as an industry. Retrofitting historic market halls is a fantastic opportunity to do just that, which also preserves the heritage of a place and brings it back to life for the benefit of local people and places.

The more completed projects of this nature that are unveiled, the more they can go on to inspire communities and people of all ages. Local authorities, developers and design teams need to make use of these amazing spaces in a climate-sensitive way.

UKREiiF is an opportunity to come together and share these stories, to help inspire others to retrofit for people and place, and our team is looking forward to the many engaging conversations at this year’s event.

• Richard Dowdall is a regional director at Civic Engineers