MEMORIES OF THE MARKET
On the Nun Street side of the Grainger Market, where at one time there was a wonderful toy stall that features in many a Christmas memory, there is a hidden door. You could easily walk past it, gaze locked on the beautiful, barrelled roof with girders the colour of mint ice cream. Perennials, shrubs, bedding plants. You might see only a stall selling flowers. But beneath, in the vast belly of the market, are the remains of a World War II bomb shelter. A concrete staircase leads down to it, starred now with glitter from the flower stall Christmas bouquets.
Descend into the past. It’s curiously warm and strewn with the relics of days gone by. A brown leather suitcase. A white cotton dress. A cup conspicuously settled on saucer and tray, as if its owner had just popped out for a moment. The tunnels are lined with old wooden benches. You could imagine hours feeling like days in this concrete network smelling of damp and the decades. But just as many traces of the past can be found on the market floor. Some say that places store memory, like handprints in wet concrete, or the way trees hold the years in rings within their trunks.
It’s in the walls – the memory of a baby elephant visiting the old Robinsons pet store on the Clayton Street exterior of the market, in the fifties. The vast crowds drawn by the British Marylin Monroe-alike, Sabrina, who arrived in a limousine to open the shop. The little honey bear, awaiting pick-up by a customer, taken for walks and photographed in the cheesemonger. And a little cat called Squeaky (whose real name is Bluebell).
They’re in the walls – the echoes of characters that have peopled the market for almost two hundred years. The man who could not get his birdseed. The goth lads who rifled through 5p plectrums at the music shop. The little girl ghost whose tiny footsteps exist perhaps only in rumour. A bearded old boy with his jam jar of tea and an umbrella in lieu of a walking stick. And a certain titled lady, armed with her baby chimpanzee, on her way to Fenwick’s for their daily afternoon tea.