Just thought I’d better drop this here for my Sheffield readers – and also for me to go back and have a proper look at when I have a moment. It’s a piece in the Guardian by Owen Hatherley voicing his displeasure at the closure of the Castle Market: Sheffield’s “Cavern of Weirdness”.
This multilevel market, with its collection of individual stalls, shops and stands, was unlike anything else in the city, or anywhere else – a 1960s dreamworld, a cornucopia, a maze of surprises, delights and, occasionally, shocks.
This isn’t what I remember it for. My memories are of an always dirty, unpleasant and occasionally dangerous place at the bottom end of town. But each to our own.
Hatherley describes the change of premises into an office district with an open air market at the centre of it as:
a good measure of current priorities: the destruction of genuinely unique and genuinely public spaces, for a mixture of nondescript heritage and rampant speculation.
But I’d rather have a business district generating revenue and accolades for the city and a smart new market area generating its own ambiance than the Castle Market any day.