Pannier Market

Covered market hall built 1959-60 by the architects Walls and Pearn for Plymouth City Council. Paul Pearn designed the building with Ken Bingham as job architect. Albin Chronowicz of British Reinforced Concrete Engineering Co. Ltd served as engineer, with David Weeks as artist.

The defining feature is the post-tensioned reinforced shell concrete roof, supported on pre-tensioned reinforced concrete trusses set at 32-foot centres. North-facing rooflights are incorporated into the roof structure. The reinforced concrete is expressed externally, with infill panels of precast concrete slabs originally cast with local aggregate, though some have since been painted. Glass panels, some of which have been renewed with mirror glass, complete the envelope.

The building contains a large central hall with a clear span of 148 feet and a length of 224 feet, accommodating market stalls. Surrounding this are shops with storage space above. Some shops have frontages to New George Street and Market Avenue, whilst others face into the market hall or run through the full depth. A gallery over single-storey shops facing Cornwall Street contains additional shops and snack bars, accessed via two staircases at the north end of the main hall. A separate small fish market hall is positioned to the north east.

The plan is logical, with a broad central entrance on the long facade to Market Avenue and smaller entrances in the side elevations from New George Street and Cornwall Street. The original shop frontages were simple, with small fascias and blinds—an example survives at 'Samanthas' on Cornwall Street—though most have since been renewed. The shops on Cornwall Street and the first-floor balcony above the corner of Market Avenue and New George Street feature small cantilevered shell roofs forming a wave pattern. Other details have been overclad with Single Regeneration Budget funding.

The interior accommodates 144 permanent stalls, each measuring 8 feet by 9 feet and arranged in blocks of six. A small area of benches to the east is used as day stalls. These arrangements have remained unchanged since the building opened. The separate fish market contains nine fish stalls. A cantilevered dogleg staircase of concrete with a broad timber balustrade leads to the gallery snack bars beneath the wavy roofs. Murals by David Weeks are positioned in the south porch with figures in the north porch.

The construction method was innovative. Portal frames were built first, with the shells constructed on shuttering afterwards—a far more flexible and economical approach than casting the two elements together. The portal frames gradually took up the weight of the shells with negligible stress transference into the shell membrane. This system achieved greater speed of construction with less shell shuttering and scaffolding required. The conoid shells made it possible to incorporate north-facing rooflights, providing cool, even natural light across the interior.

The Pannier Market exemplifies an early post-war market using the shell concrete system. Shell concrete, pioneered in Germany before the Second World War, was only widely adopted in Britain afterwards, when shortages of steel and timber and rising costs made it an ideal solution for spanning large areas without internal columns. The use of pre- and post-tensioning in conjunction with the portal frame system marked a significant development from other north light shell concrete buildings.

This was Walls and Pearn's first large building and the only commercial building in the rebuilt city centre with an important interior. It holds sociological significance: the original market, bombed in 1941, had continued operating through temporary iron structures during the war. Its permanent rebuilding symbolised Plymouth's survival and regeneration, and its completion as one of the last buildings of the new shopping area represented the spiritual completion of central Plymouth's post-war reconstruction.