That Market

Image taken from Bilston In Old Photographs, collected by Elizabeth A. Rees, Alan Sutton Publishing, 1988

Iris Rhodes reading at last night's Bilston Voices put me in a nostalgic mood again but not really about anything that fits very easily into my "Childish Things" theme. I've been thinking all day about that market. Of course I cannot be sure how accurately I remember anything about it. It was a long time ago, the old market was pulled down in the early 1970s.
I remember the imposing exterior on the High Street, a high brick front more like a grand church or perhaps a town hall than a place of trade. Two sets of doors led into the long interior with its unbroken brick and high roof with twin rows of windows that ran the length of it. Wooden stalls filled it in a double row with more secure lockable stalls at the sides.
The aisles were wide and the stalls narrow. Inside, on the right and a few stalls down was the stall I always dashed to as soon as we were through the door and even at that age, maybe seven or eight, the stall that drew me was a bookseller. When I was a little older it was where I spent most of my pocket money on cheap science fiction with lurid covers.
As I said in a previous post, nobody would now build anything so wasteful of space or so impossible to heat but it had character which is a good deal more than can be said for the shoebox building that replaced it.
One of my earliest memories is of the outside market that surrounded the side and back of this late Victorian building (built in 1892). The outside market was every bit as fascinating as the inside one. It was a chaotic and random collection of stalls selling everything that could be imagined: cloth, crockery, fruit and vegetables, bric-a-brac, clothes. There was noise and colour and life there. It was a place where a loosed hand took seconds to be converted into a lost child, and that's how, aged four I came to be lost. It's one of my earliest memories.
A moment earlier I had been with my mother and my aunt and suddenly I wasn't. At first it didn't seem so bad, climbing over the wooden carts on which the traders brought their goods into the market, dashing hither and thither among the tree trunk legs of the adults who ignored me totally.
It didn't take long to realise that it wasn't all fun. I quickly found myself missing my mom and when I couldn't find her I started to cry.
And then I was running. Without realising how I found myself on a road that I knew, Dudley Street, and I ran along it. Our house was only a short distance from the end of it and I managed to find it. I dashed inside, past my grandfather and through the living room to sit sobbing on the stairs. I don't know whose relief was greater when my frantic mother finally arrived home, hers to see me or mine to see her.

The 1970s were a grim time for Bilston, with the demolition of some of its finest buildings and their replacement by the squat ugly monstrosities of the day. Now it's all being redeveloped again into something called the "Bilston Urban Village" although the recession seems to have slowed that development almost to a halt. Should the development continue the plans look good, but I doubt it will ever be as good as the town I remember.