land bounded by Peel Street & Ramsden Street & Queensgate & Princess Street: New shops, retail market and superintendent's flat

The one place where modern architecture has really thought about the inner Huddersfield is in the new market hall. The designer here had a really difficult problem. It was a sloping site in which he had to fit this market hall. Although the outside was a bit glam, he really went to work on the inside. The firm was J. Seymour Harris who do a lot of town centre schemes up and down the country, and whoever was the designer in that firm really did Huddersfield proud here. To cope with the slope and to fit everything in he used concrete mushroom columns at intervals — mushroom because they splay out at the top and this could have been a structural gimmick; but here that are used to define spaces, to relate them, to bring the light in from the top so that you are at one with the building itself. That combined with the fact that the stalls are not regimented has made it a marvellously human place, the opposite of most indoor shopping centres. It is in-fact, and this is pretty rare in Britain — a real modern market.

Ian Nairn, The Listener 28 August 1975

Further reading :

• The Architect, Patent glazing for Huddersfield's new market hall, Sept 1972 p95
• Architectural Review, September. 1970, p200
• Building, 29 Sept 1972, p82
• Concrete, Vol 3 No 4 April.1969, Shell roofs for the market hall, Huddersfield pp160-1
• Concrete Quarterly, No 88
• Huddersfield Market, January-March 1971 pp30-32
• Glass Age, Huddersfield Market, November.1972 p40
• Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 6 April. 1970
• County Borough of Huddersfield, The official opening of the new market hall, 6 April 1970
• Marsden, Christopher; The architectural ceramics of Fritz Steller, Journal of the Tiles and Architectural Ceramics Society; 2007 vol13 pp3-15.
• Marsden, Christopher R; The engineering and construction of 21 asymmetric freestanding hyperbolic parabaloid umbrella concrete shells in Proceedings of the 2008 Symposium of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures, Acapulco, Mexico, 27 October-31; Editor, Salinas, Juan Gerado Oliva; IASS Madrid 2008
• Wright, Jon; Huddersfield's Grade II Market Hall under threat, C20, Winter 2008/9, pp. 6-7
• www.huddersfieldgem.org
• www.riskybuildings.org.uk