How Market Squares Shaped British Town Life

A Space With a Job to Do

Most British towns have a square at the middle of them, and it is easy to walk across one without noticing how odd it is. A wide, open, paved void in the middle of a crowded town is an expensive thing to keep. It exists because for centuries it was the most commercially valuable ground in the parish. From the twelfth century onwards, a market grant from the Crown or a lord turned a piece of open ground into a legal right to trade, and that right dragged everything else towards it: carts, cattle, corn, cloth, coin, gossip, and all the people who made a living from any of those.

The result is a shape you can still read in the street plan. A market square is rarely a neat rectangle inserted into a settlement. More often it is a deliberate widening of a main road, or a purpose-built space laid out alongside a new town. Salisbury, planned from the 1220s, has its market place set out as part of the grid. At Ludlow, Newark, Beverley and Kingston upon Thames, the square is simply the place where the street was allowed to breathe.

How to Read the Shape of a Square

Look at the dimensions before you look at the buildings. Market squares are usually far wider than any medieval street needed to be, because the space had to hold pens, stalls, pitches and animals rather than just pedestrians. A square big enough for a cattle market is big enough to make a town feel grand.

The buildings around the edge tell you what was sold there and who took a cut:

• The market cross or butter cross, marking the legal heart of the market and sheltering traders from rain.
• The tollbooth or guildhall, often on the square's edge, where tolls were collected and courts sat.
• Inns and coaching frontages, a sign that the square was a stopping point on a through route.
• Shambles, butchers' rows and narrow alleys, squeezed in behind stalls for trades that could not sit in the open.
• Church towers and clock faces, because civic time and market time were the same thing.

Notice, too, the survival of long, thin plots behind the frontages — the burgage plots of the original town plots. Their boundaries often still show up as alleyways, ginnels or snickets leading off the square.

The Square Bent the Streets Around It

Once a town had a market, roads changed their course to serve it. Approach roads converged on the square rather than passing through by accident, and drovers' routes ran in from the surrounding countryside, funneling animals to the pens. That is why so many British towns have a knot of streets at the centre that seem to arrive at the market place from several directions at once, and why the widest part of town is so often the oldest commercial ground.

The square also shaped the town's economy. A market right pulled trade away from neighbouring settlements, and the resulting wealth paid for the buildings that frame the space today. Competition between towns was fierce: charters were contested, and a market moved a mile down the road could cost a town dearly. On market day the square hosted not just buying and selling but hiring fairs, where farm labourers stood with a token in a hat to be taken on for the year.

A Stage for Public Life

Trade was only half the story. The square was also the town's stage, and the events held there were the ones that mattered. Proclamations were read from the cross or the guildhall steps. Elections were fought, sometimes violently, in the open. Punishments were public, from the stocks and pillory to the gallows outside town. Bonfires, coronations, jubilees, military parades and the reading of the Riot Act all found their natural home on the same paving.

Fairs extended the market calendar, running for days around a saint's feast and bringing entertainers, foreign goods and a great deal of drinking. Wells, Market Drayton and Bury St Edmunds all grew rich on this rhythm. The square was where a town assembled, and everyone knew where to stand.

Covering Up, Then Opening Out Again

The nineteenth century changed the square's function. Covered market halls, corn exchanges and increasingly fast traffic pushed trade indoors and off the open ground. In the twentieth century, many squares were treated as little more than junctions, filled with parked cars and one-way signage. Some were badly damaged: buildings were demolished, or the space was narrowed by road widening.

From the 1970s onwards the pendulum swung back. Pedestrianisation, repaving, the removal of through traffic and the return of street markets have revived squares in Alnwick, Frome, Hexham, Northampton and dozens of others. Where a square has been cared for, it is once again the most used piece of public ground in the town.

What to Look For on Your Next Visit

Stand at one corner and take in the whole space before you photograph the guildhall. Ask what the square was selling, who was collecting the tolls, and which streets were built to reach it. Check the paving for old setts and the kerb line of a former pen or cross base. Look for the narrow entries in the corners — they usually mark the medieval plot boundaries. Then find the highest building on the square, which is often the one that made the most money from the trade below.

Read a town's market square properly and you have read most of its history. The shops change, the traffic changes, the market may come and go, but the wide open ground at the middle is the clearest surviving statement of what the town was built to do.