What are the benefits of making better use of the historic fabric of our towns and cities? Richard Dowdall, regional director in our Manchester studio, explores the challenges and opportunities of retrofitting buildings and spaces, with a look at one of our projects, the transformation of Manchester’s landmark Upper and Lower Campfield Market.

Retrofitting buildings and spaces has a vitally important role to play in a wider placemaking context and is crucial for reducing embodied carbon in the built environment.

Never has this been more evident than with the wave of recent projects that are bringing historic market halls in town and city centres across the UK back to life.

In recent years, there has been a notable uptick in local authorities and developers’ ambitions to revitalise old market halls to their former glory, and for the benefit of local people and businesses.

While this growing momentum offers up many positives, the rich history of market halls can present a hidden world of unknowns, structural challenges and complexities for design teams to navigate, which in turn call for innovative and collaborative approaches.

The evolution of the UK’s historic market halls

Since the mid-1900s, dozens of Victorian market halls were demolished amidst fears they would be too costly to modernise, or instead converted into council chambers with ancillary buildings for administrative purposes, that were no longer intended for sole use by the public.

But, since the pandemic, a turning point has come. There is a growing sentiment that these structures can be put to better use to help revitalise the high street, boost footfall and support the local economy.

There are many positive examples to be found, particularly across the North and Midlands. In Accrington, the town’s listed Victorian Market Hall is being restored with plans for it to become a food and drink venue as part of a major regeneration of the wider town square. In Middlesborough, our team is working on the plans to revitalise the 19th century Town Hall, one of the town’s oldest buildings, after it has stood empty for decades. And in Doncaster, crowds of people flocked to the recent opening of the revamped Grade II-listed Corn Exchange, another of our projects, which will now operate as an events space for the community.

Elsewhere, Manchester’s landmark Upper and Lower Campfield Market is set to be transformed by Allied London after the project secured Levelling Up Funding in 2021. Once home to an indoor cheese and vegetable market in the 1800s, before latterly housing the Science and Industry Museum’s Air and Space installation, Campfield Market is a site with huge historical and sentimental significance in the region. Many local residents have fond memories of the spectacle of seeing full-sized aircraft displayed below the beautiful domed structure, but since the installation’s closure, the doors of the Market Halls have remained shut.

Refurbishing such an iconic site presents a fantastic opportunity to bring it back to life and add cultural value to the City of Manchester. We’re structural and civil engineers on the project, which is set to create a creative talent development centre to attract and support growing businesses in the tech, innovation and media sectors. It will unlock economic potential while preserving the building’s history with sensitivity and understanding.

Navigating hidden complexities

Making better use of the historic fabric of towns and cities comes with significant benefits. But such projects are not without their challenges.

Many of the listed structures that have been repurposed to house the likes of council chambers or administrative council office spaces have not always been maintained to a high standard and often have fallen into disrepair as local authorities’ budgets have tightened. It’s not uncommon to find roofs that have been leaking for decades or fire damage, for example, which has gone untreated. What might first appear as a limited aesthetic issue may in fact disguise significant damage to a building’s structural fabric, and original material and features. Many of these defects worsening through time.

Quite often, when we peel back the layers of a project, multiple challenges will emerge. Construction budgets can be blown out of the water because an initial cost appraisal or viability statement doesn’t account for all the unknowns that are tucked away. It’s a real challenge to put enough contingency into a pre-development cost plan as often, a too conservative or an overly risk adverse approach renders the project not commercially feasible from the outset.

The planning process, and getting the buy-in of local authorities, can also pose hurdles. As with any historic or listed building, there are a lot of protections in place which are there for good reason, but they can make the construction process more challenging and draw out timeframes. Projects can go on for many years, putting additional pressure on local authorities’ budgets.

Bringing design teams together that have experience of working closely with local authorities and understanding their requirements, as well as knowledge of working with historic assets, can go a long way to making plans viable from the outset.

It’s also key to assemble cross-discipline teams, including transport consultants for example, from the earliest opportunity. When market halls were originally constructed, they didn’t need to meet the planning requirements of today and many lack modern infrastructure, such as access points or space for refuse collections. Building detailed strategies that incorporate provisions for these factors and long-term maintenance is vital. It’s also important to work closely with the local community throughout, incorporating their feedback and getting their backing, for a project to be ultimately successful.

Consider reuse wherever possible

To help accelerate the shift to Net Zero carbon, it’s critical that we adopt a retrofit-first lens and repurpose as much of these buildings as possible, rather than condemning aspects because they are old.

There’s often a perception that materials or structures are not fit for purpose, but there are many creative and ingenious ways we can reuse and restore them that might not be immediately obvious, as we have at Manchester’s Mayfield Park, where we have reused historic cast iron beams of the river’s 120-year-old culvert for various new bridges within the park.

We must focus on using ‘less stuff’ to reduce embodied carbon. At Campfield Market, we’re repurposing old floorboards to form the walls and partitions, historic steelwork as part of the public realm and have carried out significant detailed analysis to allow us to retain the original substructures to support the new internal mezzanine floors. All of which are helping to reduce material usage, excavation, removal and off site disposal of materials from the buildings.

We have also created a non-intrusive mezzanine floorspace that isn’t attached to the existing frames of the building. This has reduced the impact on the historical fabric of the building and means that future usage can be easily adapted and changed as and when needed, without leaving scars or impacting the original listed building fabric.

We urgently need to prioritise low carbon design as an industry. Retrofitting historic market halls is a fantastic opportunity to do just that, which also preserves the heritage of a place and brings it back to life for the benefit of local people and places.

Rather than leaving them nestled away, under-utilised and unmaintained for years to come, rejuvenating these iconic buildings and public spaces helps us to refocus our attention to the great impact they can have on society.

The more completed projects that are unveiled of this nature, the more they can go on to inspire communities and people of all ages, local authorities, developers and design teams to make use of these amazing spaces in a climate-sensitive way.