Plymouth's Pannier Market

Roll up! Plymouth’s pannier market has something for everyone. Many city centre buildings lay destroyed in the aftermath of the Second World War and attention turned to city centre reconstruction. Shopkeepers and traders had set up in Tin Pan Alley on Drake Street during the war and continued trading. Local architects Walls and Pearn engaged Ken Bingham and Albin Chronowicz to oversee the building of the Pannier Market which Lord Mayor Percival Washbourn opened in 1959.

The building is made of reinforced concrete and received a Grade II listing in 2003 and was fully refurbished by 2016. Plymouth was granted the right to hold markets in 1253 but it wasn’t until a year after it became one of the first incorporated boroughs in England in 1440 that Henry VI granted a Royal Charter for the holding of fairs, feasts and markets. The market is a thriving part of the west end of Plymouth. The market used to be on Mill Street just above Cornwall Street but a new development for postwar Plymouth known as the Abercrombie Plan led to fast and wide-scale reconstruction and developed the city centre as a pedestrianised and functional modernist city.