On your right, look for the long stone frontage wrapped around a broad glass-and-wrought-iron roof, with little baroque turrets pricking the skyline like a Victorian flourish.
This is Borough Market, Halifax’s great covered market, and it really does announce itself. It fills a town-centre block between Southgate, Albion Street, and Market Street, with ornate four-storey stone buildings on two sides and a huge canopy stretching over the trading space. Those upper floors were living quarters for traders and managers, so this was never just a shopping spot... it was a whole working world.
Trade had already rooted itself here by eighteen ten, when an Act of Parliament forced street trading into this area. Before the market you see now, a red-brick Georgian market from seventeen ninety stood on the site. Then, in eighteen fifty-three, another Act let Halifax council buy what people called New Market for seven thousand seven hundred pounds, roughly around a million pounds today. By eighteen ninety, the old place was overflowing, so the Markets and Fairs Committee hired local architects Joseph and John Leeming to dream bigger. The Corporation raised fifty thousand pounds for the job, several million today, but the final bill climbed to one hundred and thirty thousand pounds, well over ten million in modern money. Victorian ambition had expensive taste.
Work started in October eighteen ninety-two and moved slowly, but the payoff came on the twenty-fifth of July, eighteen ninety-six, when the Duke and Duchess of York opened it here in Halifax. Later, the world knew them as King George the Fifth and Queen Mary.
And inside... wow. An eighteen-metre octagonal lantern rises at the center - octagonal just means eight-sided - held up by decorative cast-iron columns. The main walkways form a cross shape under the roof, and the floor still uses flagstones from Solomon Marshall’s quarry at Southowram. Cleverly, the whole sloping site works without steps. If you glance at the image on your screen, you can see the market’s famous clock, the old meeting point that craftsmen refurbished with more than fifty square feet of gold leaf in nineteen ninety-three.
The market’s edges once told you exactly what was sold where: butchers around most of the outside, fishmongers on Albion Street, and three pubs on Market Street - the Wheatsheaf, the Saddle, and the Peacock. Halifax kept polishing this place too: the stonework got cleaned in nineteen seventy-three, the Victorian shopfronts won a Civic Trust award in nineteen eighty-seven, and in two thousand and eight the market won best market from the National Association of British Market Authorities. If you want, the app’s before-and-after image gives a neat little glimpse of how the exterior sharpened up between two thousand and eight and twenty twenty-two.
It’s Grade Two Star listed, which means it’s officially recognized as an especially important historic building. If you want to come back inside, it usually opens Monday through Saturday from eight in the morning to four-thirty in the afternoon, and it closes on Sundays.
Borough Market proves that everyday buying and selling can look absolutely grand.
Take a moment here, and when you’re ready, we can wander on to Halifax Town Hall.
