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From Market hall to Museum: the changing uses of a building.
The story of the Market Hall building, Much Wenlock 1878 – 1998
Introduction
April 1998. Repairs complete, the museum reopened for the summer season.
An undistinguished building at the Guildhall end of High Street at present holds Much Wenlock Museum together with a small tourist information office, both open only during the summer months and both serving primarily the town’s increasing number of visitors. But the building has for most of its 120-year life played a more dynamic role in the life of the townspeople themselves. Constructed originally as a market hall in 1878, it was a forum for local agricultural produce and manufactured goods brought by train from towns like Wolverhampton. Wenlock’s decline as a retail market centre, however, presented the First World War Memorial Committee with an excellent opportunity to provide a much-needed venue, other than inns and public houses, for dances and meetings (1). The building’s future was then assured for several decades during which town and district organisations patronised the hall with varying regularity.
From 1935 onwards, however, the hall was a part-time commercial cinema too, the seats being reinstalled before each performance. When Wenlock’s British Legion Hall was built after World War II, the role of the memorial hall rapidly diminished till in 1953 the Board was happy to allow the cinema proprietor a long lease on a sole-use basis. Once more, however, Wenlock’s fading importance as a district centre, together with the spread of television and the affordability of the motor car, imposed change on the building’s use: the cinema company collapsed in 1963 leaving the board holding an empty cinema. For several years the Hall struggled to find a suitable new role until being leased by the Borough Council (2) for a museum to be established there. In 1974 the museum (3) was taken over by the County Council (4). The museum remains today although there were proposals in the 1990's to install the town library (5) in it which would have again allowed it to serve predominantly the people of Much Wenlock as it did as Market hall, Memorial Hall and cinema.
1. Meeting places otherwise available were inns and public houses.
2. The Rural Borough Council from 1966-74
3. And the lease on the building
4. Under the local Government Act (1972) which transferred all museums under former rural borough control to county councils from 1st April 1974.
5. Presently at the Corn Exchange