2 Market Place

No. 2 Market Place is a former bank building constructed in 1870 by architect George Gordon Hoskins for Backhouse & Company. It is built in a Gothic Revival style using bright red brick with ashlar dressings and marble nookshafts, topped with a Welsh slate roof featuring brick and ashlar chimneys. The building stands three storeys high and has five windows across its façade, which includes a painted plinth and ashlar floor bands.

The ground-floor openings feature raised segmental heads adorned with polychrome voussoirs and roll-moulded dripstrings, with enriched arches on an impost string. The ashlar jambs are complemented by marble nookshafts, leading to a renewed glass door in the fourth bay, which is embellished with clasping rings and stiff leaf capitals. An elaborate wrought-iron grille is present in the door overlight, and the steeply sloping sills are set on a Lombard frieze between the jambs. The upper windows also have similar impost strings and ashlar nookshafts, with the first floor showcasing shouldered surrounds and raised square heads, along with wrought-iron rails on moulded sills.

On the second floor, smaller windows with segmental heads are set beneath bracketed moulded sills, rising to the top cornice. Roundels in the gablets above the windows contain carved stone shields, except for the central gablet, which displays the date 1870. Flower stops decorate the dripmoulds over the roundels, and prominent mace finials are found on the footstones and gablet copings. The steeply pitched roof breaks forward between the end gables and features spirelets on the front angle and three half-hipped dormers in between. The gables are crowned with high end chimneys that have ashlar plinths and cornices.

Inside, the entrance screen consists of three Gothic arches, while other original partitions have been removed. The ceiling is heavily moulded with a continuous repeating pattern of flowers in linked circles.