Llanidloes Market Hall

It stands in the middle of the crossroads. Not beside it — in it, on oak posts, with the ground floor open on all sides so that the market could operate underneath while the town's business went on in the room above.

It is usually dated to around 1600.

Why it is unusual

Market halls of this form were once common across the Marches and the English midlands. Ledbury, Ledbury's neighbours, and a scatter of others survive over the border.

In Wales there is one, and this is it. The rest were demolished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as towns rebuilt their centres, or replaced with stone.

Llanidloes kept its because Llanidloes could not afford to replace it, which is the same reason a great deal of what survives in this county survives.

How it worked

The open ground floor is the market. Traders set up between the posts, sheltered from rain, in the exact centre of the town where four roads meet.

The upper room, reached by an external stair, did everything else: it has served as a courtroom, a council chamber, a working men's institute, a library and a museum.

That vertical separation of commerce below and administration above is the whole logic of a market town in one building. Almost every Powys town had the same arrangement in some form. This is the one that is still standing.

What happened in it

John Wesley preached from a stone beside the building on more than one occasion in the 1740s, during the tours that established Methodism in mid Wales.

In April 1839 the town was at the centre of one of the first Chartist risings, when a crowd freed three arrested Chartists from the Trewythen Arms a short distance away and the magistrates lost control of the town for several days. Thirty-two people were tried at Welshpool that summer and three were transported.

The building was in the middle of all of it, as it has been in the middle of everything in Llanidloes for four hundred years.

Now

The upper floor houses the town museum, with local collections and material relating to the Van lead mine. Opening is seasonal.

The structure has been repaired and consolidated several times, most recently in a substantial conservation programme, and the timbers are a mixture of original and replacement — which is normal for a building of this age and construction.

Visiting

It is in the middle of the town and impossible to miss. Free to look at, charged or donation for the museum, and the ground floor is open to walk through.

The rest of Llanidloes repays a wander: the mill buildings along the Severn, St Idloes church with its nave arcade brought from Abbeycwmhir after the dissolution, and a town centre that has changed less than most.