Saturday, December 27, 2025
The history of Britain's best large indoor market
I make a point nowadays of visiting markets whenever I go to a new place. I grew up revelling in the delightful chaos and colour of Birkenhead market, only to see it now relocated and constrained within sterile, shuttered bunkers without any real atmosphere. Swansea market, however, has so far resisted such modernisation and continues to convey the sort of bustling activity and liveliness which I have always associated with such destinations.
According to the council website, this is the third market to be located on Oxford Street, having opened over 50 years ago, but the history of Swansea market goes back much further.
The archive service tells us that the earliest covered market dates back to 1652, and was located under the shadow of the Castle, but the first purposely built market building was known as Market House and erected in 1774:
Market House was situated at the Castle end of Wind Street with the wonderfully named Butter and Potato streets leading down either side of the building with Island House in front which dates back to Medievel times.Market House was a low roofed, one floored building supported by pillars and had no outer walls. Surrounding streets were stood cheek by jowl and lack of space meant traders would spill over on each others pitches.
They record that by the 1870's Island house was demolished to make way for the new street trams and Market House followed suit:
Swansea had also outgrown its Castle located market and by the end of the 19th century expansion was needed as the town population mushroomed from around 13,000 in 1830 to over 90,000 by the 1890s.
The archives site tells us that the new market was much larger:
It boasted entrances on Oxford Street, Union Street and Orange Street. A modest rubble wall punctuated with chimneys ran alongside the Oxford Street face, enclosing the stalls and encircling an area measuring 320 by 220 feet (98 by 67 metres). A market house was situated in the centre with a prominent clock tower which was built with stone from the old market hall by the Castle.
However, by late Victorian times, massive improvements were urgently needed and, as the archives site records, the market was modernised and expanded:
On 22 June 1897 (the same day as Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee) a brand new red Ruabon brick-fronted building was opened to the public by the mayor, Councillor Howell Watkins. It covered the same two-acre site as its predecessor, but with a grand façade built around the Oxford Street entrance with two 60ft high towers greeting you to a new shopping experience. This time a roof covered the whole market, and was at the time the largest structure of glass and wrought ironwork in the UK.
In December 1897 electricity was introduced to the market and by 1900 the corporation's new power station at the Strand lit the whole building. History was in the making.
The second Oxford Street Market was an impressive and important building in Swansea's architectural history and housed an incredible 597 stalls by the end of the 1920s. As always many stalls sold fresh produce from the Gower peninsula which made the market very desirable to visitors and tourists. It was boom time.
The picture above shows the impressive frontage, but it was not to survive the second world war. The archives site takes up the story:
During the 3 Nights' Blitz of February 1941, the Luftwaffe devastated central Swansea. The bombs showed no mercy to the market.
The external walls remained, but the roof and interior was completely destroyed, leaving the iron structure in ruins. The market would have to be replaced along with the majority of the town centre, but as it was such a mammoth task to rebuild the town after the Blitz, the rebuilding of the market had to be put back by several years.
Nonetheless it was essential to keep supplying the people of Swansea with food in these testing times. Action was taken with a temporary market, set up on the upper floors of the bus garage in Singleton Street. The market stalls were reinstated in Oxford Street in October 1941 where it remained as an open-air market through the 1940s and 1950s. Temporary sites were at Whitewalls (the site of the present Primark store) and between Orange Street and Wassail Square (now the area covered by the Quadrant Shopping Centre).
Like a modern Phoenix from the ashes, and almost 20 years since the loss of the red-brick behemoth, our current market was opened on 18 May 1961 at 11.30am by the Mayor Councillor Sidney Jenkins JP, and the Chairman of the Estates Committee Alderman Francis Charles Jones, who said it was a historic occasion, "a day of accomplishment and pride."
