The Market Swansea Almost Built

Good morning, Swansea!

When the Luftwaffe destroyed Swansea Market during World War II, defiant traders were back selling within the year - first on a bus garage floor, then out in the open air. It would be almost twenty years before they had a roof over their heads again.

This week, we're looking at the market's slow journey from bombed-out ruin to the building we shop in today - and the entirely different, wildly ambitious market Swansea nearly built instead.

I’ll catch you on Sunday!

For three nights in February 1941, the Luftwaffe pounded Swansea's town centre in what became known as the Three Nights' Blitz. The market had already stood on Oxford Street since 1830, but on the night of February 19th, its building - a red-brick hall opened in 1897, once home to the largest wrought-iron and glass roof of any market in Britain - took a direct hit, leaving the roof and interior completely gutted, and the iron structure in ruins.

Walking into the town centre with his friend Bert Trick, Dylan Thomas passed the wrecked market on his way through the ruins the very next day. Trick later wrote that "the air was acrid with smoke, and the hoses of the firemen snaked among the blackened entrails of what had once been Swansea market." As they parted, Thomas, tears in his eyes, told Trick: "Our Swansea is dead."

But, Swansea’s market traders were not to be dettered. Stalls first moved to the upper floors of the Singleton Street bus garage, then from October 1941 out in the open on the market's old ground on Oxford Street, where the market remained for the rest of the decade and into the next. As rebuilding of the town centre continued, traders were shifted between whatever cleared ground the council could offer, including spells at Whitewalls (now Primark), and the land between Orange Street and Wassail Square, long since absorbed into the Quadrant.

In October 1949, a young Swansea architect put forward a design for a new market building for the Oxford Street site. Michael V.H. Watkins was in his final year at the Welsh School of Architecture, working on a diploma thesis substantial enough to earn exemption from the Royal Institute of British Architects’ final examination. His subject was a municipal market and hall for Swansea, backed by a full model of the building - visible above.

In the paper, Watkins set out the scale of his ambition - to build a market that locals could be proud of. "How many Swansea people have not, at some time during the past eight years, had dreams of a magnificent town centre, architecturally beautiful and really modern, arising from the rubble left by the Luftwaffe?" he wrote.

However, his plans covered far more than a market. Underground, on the site where Orange Street used to run, Watkins proposed parking for 120 vehicles with delivery bays and roadways to the basement. At street level, the market hall itself would have a parabolic concrete-and-glass roof, a first-floor balcony for peak shopping times, shops and a restaurant and pub to the west, and cold stores tucked underneath.

Watkins also proposed a public hall with room for 5,000 people, adaptable for dances, concerts, exhibitions, an ice rink, and other sporting events. The restaurant next door would double as a concert hall, and the second floor above the public hall would hold squash courts and a BBC broadcast control room, wired to carry whatever was happening inside out over the airwaves.

By the time Swansea's market did eventually open, twelve years later, much of Watkins’ plans had not survived onto the site. What went up instead was a market (whose shape mirrored the original design), a run of shops, and a hotel - a more modest brief the council actually awarded to another designer, Percy Thomas & Son - who had previously been responsible for the design of Swansea’s Guidhall.

Work on the new Swansea Market began in 1959, with building carried out by contractors Robert M Douglas Ltd. Its steel arched roof, clad in glass and aluminium, spanned 192 feet in a single curve. When it opened on 18 May 1961, the market itself was reported to have cost around £250,000.

That was only the council's half of the site. Wrapped around the market was a separate development by Sir Leslie Joseph - a Swansea-born businessman known as Wales's "funfair king," who ran Coney Beach Pleasure Park in Porthcawl. Joseph's company built 23 shops, a bank and a 40-bedroom hotel alongside the market, at a reported cost of around £412,000, with several of the shops let before the building work was even finished.

The area continued to change in the years after the market first welcomed traders and customers - including the Quadrant Shopping Centre, which opened next door in 1979, covering the last of the ground the market's stalls had used as overspill space during the open-air years. In 2013 the market got its own BBC One documentary series, complete with a surprise visit from Prince Charles, and the council spent £1 million overhauling a roof that had already outlived its lifespan by two decades. By 2020 it had a title to match its history - winning Britain's Best Large Indoor Market at the Great British Market Awards - and most recently, new entrances and signage have been installed.

Empty shopfronts and closing-down sales have defined Swansea city centre for much of the last decade, with a similar story playing out on high streets across the country. The market hasn't been spared the wider pressures on retail, but it's held its ground where plenty of neighbouring shops haven't, with a huge variety of stalls trading side by side, and footfall that markets in other town and city centres would envy.

After surviving the Blitz and nearly twenty years without a roof, a difficult high street is hardly the first challenge Swansea Market has seen off - and long may it continue.

I'll catch you on Sunday!

Andrew

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