What Three Words: ///vampire.comforted.beaters
OS Grid Reference: SX105598
Now a car park, this was originally a busy livestock market with regular auctions of cattle, sheep, and pigs.
Markets have been held in the town since the 12th century. By the 19th century there was a weekly livestock market held in Ducken Street, so-named as the place where a ducking stool was used to duck offenders into the Cober stream (also known as the Cob Lake or Coffee Lake). With the market becoming a successful feature of town life, the street was renamed Market Street (it is now Queen Street).
A purpose-built cattle market was established in 1906, on the site of a former mine tramway depot at the rear of North Street. The market included offices, cattle, sheep, and pig pens, and various ancillary facilities. The cattle and sheep were initially herded through the streets, as they always had been, but by the 1930s, cattle were being brought to market by lorry and the narrow entrance from North Street had to be enlarged by the demolition of a house built above its entrance gate. In 1939, a new entrance was built at what is now Pleyber Christ Way. In addition to the regular livestock auction, the town held a Christmas fatstock market and a May Sheep Show. The market became unprofitable and was closed down in 1976, when Cornwall Council acquired the site to use as a car park and a Fire Station. The sole remaining part of the old market is the Market Office, now used as the Children’s Clinic. The Scout Hut was built on the site of the pig pens. On the lower part of the stone wall on the left-hand side of the entrance from North Street can be seen building stones containing red-stained iron ore.
Views of the market
Market Street was renamed Queen Street after a royal visit in 1846. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had been visiting the iron mine and stopped briefly in Market Street on their way back to the royal yacht at Fowey. Here they heard a formal address delivered by the Mayor. To mark this event, an entertainment was held the following day at the castle, following a civic parade through the town. The mayor’s speech, noting ‘our proud privilege this day to tread the soil from which the print of the royal footstep is scarcely obliterated’, disregarded the fact that the Queen had barely left her carriage during her brief time in the town. This did not dampen the enthusiasm of the town, as the local newspaper reported that the Queen’s health ‘was drunk repeatedly with the greatest enthusiasm’. It was at the civic dinner that evening, held in the Talbot hotel, that the Mayor announced the renaming of both Market Street and Duke Street, and the renaming of the Bank behind the Talbot stables as Albert Terrace.
Albert Terrace, formerly The Bank
To read the memories that local residents have of market day