Market Hall is a last link to bygone Derby

Anton Rippon takes a nostalgic look at one of Derby’s last links with the past – the Market Hall.

Derby Market Hall pictured in about 1915

It was the place where the first-ever bananas to arrive in Derby were put on sale, where, at one time, hundreds of rabbits were sold each week and where Derby’s 19th-Century police officers trained in its cobbled yard.

At a time when we’ve become accustomed to shopping almost round the clock, and when the giant Westfield Derby centre has already attracted hundreds of thousands of people to the city centre, it is interesting to muse that, around the turn of the last century, this Derby trading institution thought nothing of a 17-hour day.

And another thing, unlike the cosy, dry Westfield shopping experience, conditions here were often draughty and bitterly cold.

It is 25 years ago since the demolition of the old fish market, in what is now Osnabruck Square, gave Derbeians a new view of one of the city’s great old favourites – the Market Hall.

Love it or hate it, Derby Market Hall enjoys an undeniably unique atmosphere with its echoing acoustics and its comparatively spartan conditions, all of which add a great deal of character to one of the city’s most cherished shopping areas.

In a city that has changed so much over the past 25 years, the Market Hall, with its bustling, noisy, some might even say slightly vulgar, atmosphere, is probably the last major link with the disappearing Derby of other generations.

One says bustling and noisy but, in fact, even that is becoming muted as the 21st century gets well underway.

The roof has been known to leak – come to think of it, so has that of the spanking-new Westfield – and, in these times of supermarkets, hypermarkets, plush department stores and American-style shopping malls, the Market Hall offers a nostalgic trip into another shopping age – and that is meant as a compliment.

Derby Market Hall was built in 1864-5, at a cost of £29,000, with its decorated cast-iron columns, glazed roof and ornate clock, which told the time to generations of Derbeians anxious to catch a tram or a train or, in later years, when the time was up on their parked cars.

A view of the Market Hall, from the corner of Tenant Street and Albert Street after demolition work in the are

In those early days, there were two rows of flower stalls near the Cornmarket and a row of wholesale stalls, while the fish market ran along the side of the Market Place.

There it remained until the fish market was erected on the south side of the Market Place in 1926. It was the demolition of that building in the early 1980s that allowed us to view the Market Hall as it had looked before the First World War.

The first Jamaican bananas in Derby were sold in the Market Hall. Until the end of the 19th century, bananas grown on the plantations of the Caribbean and elsewhere were solely for use there, until businessmen became alive to the possibilities of exporting them to Europe.

It wasn’t long before Derbeians were able to enjoy this new exotic fruit.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Market Hall stallholders worked very long hours – from 6am to 11pm on Saturdays, for instance. And the hall closed on only two days each year – Christmas Day and Good Friday.

When Derby County played big FA Cup ties in the days of Steve Bloomer, and when the crowds flocked to Derby races on Nottingham Road, the Market Hall staged penny bazaars in the gallery that surrounded the inner area.

These were the days of an open market in the Market Place, of rich customers in carriages, of barrow boys and of gas lamps casting their eerie glow in the Colonnade underneath the Guildhall.

Then there was the cold. In those days, the Market Hall had no doors and, eventually, a deputation went to see the markets committee.

The stallholders got their doors and also won a promise that the Market Hall would be repainted and refitted.

Adjacent to the Market Hall, in the Lock-Up Yard, where the fish market (and also a monument to the great Steve Bloomer) is now sited, was a police station.

The policemen of Victorian Derby were often seen doing their physical jerks in the cobbled yard that ran from the Cornmarket past the lock-up and into the Market Hall.

In that lock-up was kept something known as “the stretcher”, although it looked more like a shallow coffin complete with straps.

The PL Felix and Sons stall in 1969

The policemen used it to tame unruly prisoners, usually drunks, although it was occasionally pressed into service by Market Hall stallholders who used it to carry their goods to storage in the Morledge.

Recently, Jean Wacey, now living in British Columbia, wrote to the Evening Telegraph with memories of her first job when she left school – working on a stall in Derby Market Hall in 1938.

Jean earned 7s (40p) for a 48-hour week – “about standard for the time”, she recalled.

The interior of the Market Hall was completely reconstructed in 1938 and the roof was completely recovered in 1964, although the essential character remained largely unchanged since Thorburn’s original design of 142 years ago.

In 1989, another refurbishment restored the Victorian design, so, ironically, many of today’s Derbeians, at least those over 25, have lost “their” Market Hall interior, which was of pre-war rather than 19th-century design.

At the time of its opening, the Market Hall housed 180 stalls on the ground floor and the balcony.

A Derby Corporation publication of the mid-1950s announced that the Market Hall housed 31 butchers and provision merchants, two caterers, 17 fruiterers, 10 florists, five newsagents, a draper, china stores and their like, eight fish merchants, seven poulterers and livestock merchants.

It had, the book said, “a splendid system of heating” and a “one-span roof, two-thirds allowing maximum natural daylight”.

During those years, and before, premises adjoining the poultry market housed live poultry, rabbits, dogs, cats, aquarium fish and a host of other pets.

All these places, fish market, poultry market and pet stores, were included in the wider term “covered market” but it is for the Market Hall itself that we feel most affection.

According to a Derby City Council spokesman: “Today’s Market Hall is a major attraction to the city and brings in visitors and shoppers from throughout this country.

“With traders who, for generations, have served the citizens of Derby and built up close links with their customers, are the new generation of traders bringing their own modern goods and ideas to the hall.

The newspaper stand has been run by the Poynton family for six generations

“Separate fish and poultry sections and a large number of meat and fruit and vegetable traders ensure that the hall gives the supermarkets a run for their money.

“Produce is fresh daily and many an office worker can find their lunches in the cafes and stalls in the hall.

“The Market Hall has adapted to the needs of the population and, together with newsagents, confectionery and clothing stalls, there has been the growth of service stalls, such as key-cutting, shoe repair, hairdressing, nail bar and advice centres.

“Traders believe that the Market Hall is more than adequately equipped to evolve as the public becomes more demanding over the next decades and that they, the traders, will rise to the challenge. There are craft stalls available to let on a daily basis on the balcony with goods such as hand-made items and antiques and bric-a-brac for sale.”

So, the traders have sometimes changed but it takes little imagination to stand in the middle of this friendly, noisy Market Hall now and picture the scenes of pre-1914, with the gas lamps casting their yellow light over the comings and goings of Derbeians from a different age.

It is a fact that Derby Market Hall is just about our final link with a city that we shall never see again.

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