Corn Exchange And Attached Railings Market House And Attached Railings

Corn Exchange and Market House with Attached Railings, Bridgwater

This combined corn exchange and market house stands on Cornhill and includes Nos. 1-11 High Street. The original market house was built in 1834 to designs by John Bowen, an amateur architect who worked as an India merchant. The corn exchange fronting the market hall dates from 1875 and was designed by Charles Knowles.

The building is constructed of limestone ashlar with slate roofs and a lead dome. Its most striking feature is a spectacular shallow-domed circular portico facing Cornhill, which forms the focal point of the streetscape. This portico is surmounted by a tall glazed hexagonal domed lantern with a large finial. The dome stands on a drum with six recessed panels to the front, which contain raised olive wreaths. A larger circular parapet wall sits above a double colonnade with recessed panels and an entablature supported by Ionic columns to the front and Tuscan columns behind. The paired plinths are set in a circle of four steps.

The architectural composition consists of a tall single-storey market hall to the centre, flanked by lower two-storey shops to the sides. The colonnade is flanked by recessed panels with Tuscan pilasters and blind flat-arched windows in moulded eared architraves that taper towards the tops. The stepped-forward bays at the outer ends have three steps to the centre of the blocking course with paired plinths to Tuscan antae and Ionic columns in antis, which flank twentieth-century shop fronts. The returns in High Street and Cornhill feature central bays that serve as entrances to the market hall, stepped forward and pedimented over Tuscan antae and Ionic columns in antis on double plinths. To the left of the right return, a bay with three steps to the centre of the blocking course has paired Tuscan pilasters flanking a plate-glass shop-front with a three-light horizontal window above. Between this and the centre are five unequal bays with gauged flat stone arches articulated by Tuscan pilasters, containing twentieth-century doors and plate-glass windows below three-light plate-glass horizontal fixed windows. Five similar unequal bays to the right of the central entrance have an additional storey with six plate-glass sash windows in moulded eared and shouldered architraves below a cornice and blocking course. The window to the right is between paired Tuscan pilasters. To the right of the central entrance pediment are faintly painted words reading "POST OFFICE". The left return on Cornhill is similar but single storey with a pedimented entrance in the left projecting bay.

The Corn Exchange immediately behind the rotunda is square with a glazed hipped roof above horizontal-planked coving and rich late nineteenth-century ornament to the front and back walls. The central entrances feature Byzantine-style semicircular gauged brick arches with slightly pointed arches to the extrados, large keystones, and heavy cable moulding in concave moulding to the intrados. The tympanum of the rear arch bears the Town Arms, while the main entrance has angels in its tympanum. Flanking the entrances are triple concave ashlar niches in similar style with floral capitals to stone columns; the central, slightly larger niches contain windows, some now blocked. The market to the rear has a late nineteenth-century iron-framed roof above the original open-air area, with a range at the rear of the market hall retaining an early nineteenth-century king-post roof with a later clerestorey. The undercroft of the rotunda, now used as public toilets, has brick vaulting.

Cast-iron railings to the sides of the colonnade flank the entrances to the undercroft. Tall cast-iron double gates to the market hall entrances have long and short railings, with arrow heads on the short ones and fleur-de-lys on the long ones, a diamond-pattern frieze to the middle, and a scroll frieze below the top rail.

The site occupies an island that had been developed as shambles in the mid-fourteenth century. This represents a very fine example of a market building of considerable architectural quality and scale, and is of major importance to the townscape at the centre of Bridgwater. The town's markets for corn, livestock, and cheese were by the 1790s the largest in Somerset.