Kirkgate Market: The Heart of Leeds for 150 Years
In 1884, a young Russian-Jewish market stallholder set up a penny bazaar in Kirkgate Market. His name was Michael Marks, and the partner he would eventually find – Thomas Spencer – is the reason that every Marks & Spencer that has ever existed traces its origin to a stall in a covered market in Leeds. That origin is the most famous fact about Kirkgate Market, and it is barely the most interesting one.
The Building
The current market building – the Victorian indoor hall on Vicar Lane with its cast-iron columns and the glazed roof that floods the main hall with light – opened in 1904. It replaced an earlier structure and has itself been through multiple phases of renovation, most recently the restoration of the fish and meat market sections in the 2010s. The building is Grade I and II listed across its different sections and is one of the finest surviving Victorian market halls in England. It is also a working market, which gives it a life that many preserved Victorian buildings lose.
What Is Sold Here
Everything, essentially. The market covers fresh produce, fish and meat, fabric and haberdashery, clothing, electrical goods, books, flowers, houseplants, greeting cards, luggage, fast food from about twenty different cuisine traditions, coffee, and a cafe that has been serving full English breakfasts to the working population of Leeds for as long as anyone can remember. The coverage is not curated or coherent – it is the result of a market that responds to what people actually want to buy, which is a different thing from what developers imagine they want to buy.
The People Who Work Here
A significant proportion of the market traders are second- and third-generation stallholders. The fish merchant whose grandfather started the stall; the fabric trader whose family has been on the same pitch for sixty years. This continuity is what gives Kirkgate Market its character – it is not a collection of pop-up concepts or street food operators doing a season, it is a commercial ecosystem that has evolved over 150 years.
Modernisation and the Future
The market has been through several attempted modernisations, some more successful than others. The street food hub that now operates alongside the traditional traders has introduced a newer demographic to the market without displacing the established ones – an unusual outcome in regeneration contexts. The challenge going forward is maintaining the civic character of the market – its function as the city’s democratic shopping space – while managing the pressures of a property market that sees the Vicar Lane location differently than a market trader does.
Kirkgate Market is the city’s most honest self-portrait. It reflects what Leeds actually is rather than what it is being marketed as, and that quality is rarer in any city than the Instagram presence of any number of carefully designed rooftop bars.