A fortnight ago, we told how Darlington’s market fatally collapsed before it was even open. Here Chris Lloyd completes the story of the complex which is central to the town’s image.

THE first municipal building in Darlington was the Toll Booth. It was a hulking ramshackle affair, where the Covered Market is today. It consisted of a courtroom and offices where the Bishop of Durham’s men collected his market tolls from all who bought and sold.

Beside the Toll Booth, at the top of Tubwell Row, was the Market Cross. A market cross – a meeting place but also a symbol in stone of the sanctity of a bargain – had dominated the Market Place since the 12th Century. The current one was erected in 1727 by Dame Dorothy Brown.

On April 13, 1808, George Allan of Blackwell Grange laid the foundation stone for a new town hall on the site of the Toll Booth. It was an Italianate building, topped by a belltower. It included the first police cell, although the constables were told off for leaving their lock-up in a “filthy condition” in 1836.

A shambles – a rough, covered market – was added in 1815 to the town hall. A butter market followed, providing shelter for the mainly elderly women who sold their homemade dairy products.

In the 1850s, the newlyformed Local Board of Health, dominated by the town’s ruling Pease family of Quakers, decided to build a covered market. Foul air and free-running animals, they said, made the open market unhealthy.

However, many townspeople suspected the board of self-glory, as a new town hall was part of the project. Controversially, the board awarded the contract to an unknown 30-year-old Quaker architect from Manchester, Alfred Waterhouse, to whom several of the board members were related by marriage.

Before the market was opened, on December 10, 1863, its floor collapsed, killing a farmer, as Echo Memories told a fortnight ago.

Because of the embarrassment, “there was no opening ceremony,” said the Darlington and Stockton Times of May 1864.

“The only official act was the apprehension of a couple of pickpockets who, by way of inauguration, tried their hands at a lady’s pocket and got them into a pair of handcuffs.”

Local legend has it that the first purchase in the market was made at 7am on May 2 by John Wrightson, the landlord of the Sun Inn, who bought a leg of mutton from Jack Crawford.

THE collapse of the market was Waterhouse’s only building failure in his long career and he is now recognised as the country’s greatest mid-Victorian architect. He was exonerated – the blame lay with the local iron roller – but he never again built solely in iron.

On July 16, 1864, stallholder William Walters was charged with breaking Market Bye-Law No 55: “No person shall cry or shout his or her articles, goods, wares or merchandise.”

Despite being warned, Mr Walters “persisted in crying out the merits of the articles he had for sale, bawling out to the great annoyance of other people”.

He was arrested after “calling out ‘fourpence a pound for cherries’ in such a loud voice that it could be heard right across the market”. Magistrates fined him five shillings (25p) with four shillings (20p) costs, or gave him the option of 14 days imprisonment.

Above the newsagents in the market is a hatch from which the market manager kept an eye on proceedings on the market floor.

Next to the hatch, you can still make out four boltholes where a bell was attached to the wall. The manager would ring the bell at 9pm to announce the start of the auctions – all perishable food was auctioned off each night in those pre-refrigeration days.

The market only had a little iron fence around it to keep out dogs. Smoke from chimneys got trapped, contaminating the food. The market was also too small, and in August 1864 Joseph Pease, chairman of the board, proposed arcades be added.

An opponent on the board told him: “You have spoiled the Market Place and you can’t remedy it.”

The Market Cross moved inside the market and its place at the top of Tubwell Row was taken by a fountain. Unfortunately, the water spewed out of the basin and turned the dirt street into a muddy quagmire.

After about a decade, Mr Pease kindly offered to put the fountain in his private park.

Mr Pease paid £1,000 for the clock to be installed at the top of the tower. Francis Mewburn, the Peases’ railway solicitor, wrote in his diary: “What a sum to pay for an encumbrance!”

ON Saturday, July 23, 1864, the Darlington Telegraph reported: “Two of the five bells, which are for the future to warn the inhabitants of Darlington of the flight of time, were hoisted into the tower, and about half-past four on Thursday afternoon, the soundness and quality of the metal was tested, the sonorous sounds quite startling the residents in the peaceful locality of the hall.”

They bells are inscribed: “Cast by John Warner & Son, London, 1863.” Mr Warner was a bellfounder from Norton-on-Tees who found fame in 1856 by volunteering to cast a bell for London that was so large it would become known as Big Ben.

The 7ft diameter clock dials were to be illuminated by gas light. Unfortunately, on September 26, 1864, at 11pm, when men first tried to light the gas, they set fire to the ladder they were standing on and the wooden floor.

“We also understand that the man who took the principal part in extinguishing the flames was burnt about the hands,”

reported the Darlington and Stockton Times.

Originally, the clockface was red and the hands were golden. The gaslight, once they got it going, burned green. The townspeople nicknamed it “Dracula’s Castle”, and they struggled to see the time. Mr Pease agreed to make the dials white.

The clock was made by Thomas Cooke of York. In his day, Mr Cooke made the largest telescope in the world, as well as turretclocks.

The clock was handwound three times a week until it was electrified in 1977.

It took 70 turns on a huge handle to raise the two lead weights to the top of the tower.

Waterhouse was very busy in the Tees Valley in the mid- 1860s, building mansions for the Darlington Quakers (a complete list of his works can be found on the Echo Memories blog).

After the market complex, he designed Backhouses’ Bank, in High Row, an absolutely splendid building.

While it was being constructed, the bank paid £12 a month to rent the new town hall in the market complex.

Work on the bank went hand-in-hand with his extensions to the market.

Both projects were held up by a bout of strikes. Every group of workers was out at one time in the mid-1860s – 15 German tailors were imported into Bank Top station in September 1866 amid chaotic scenes to break the tailoring strike.

Backhouses were installed in their £12,185 bank by April 1866. The market extension was completed later that autumn. Darlington market was supposed to cost £7,815.

The final bill came to £9,851.

Then it had to be extended and its walls boarded up: an additional cost of £2,615.

Total: £12,466 – a 59 per cent overspend. One man had been killed; another burned.

Municipal project management in Darlington has come a long way since then… ■ With thanks to Robin Blair the greengrocer.