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The best architecture in London: buildings where the building is the reason to go, the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.
London's first square, and the neo-classical market hall dropped into the middle of it two centuries later.
GeorgianVictorian & EdwardianYou can go insideFree
Also in 30 Things to See First.
Inigo Jones laid the piazza out from 1631 for the fourth Earl of Bedford, working from the Place des Vosges and the squares he had seen in Italy. It was the first formal square in London: arcaded houses on three sides, St Paul's church closing the west end, and a brief from the Earl for buildings fit for gentlemen and men of ability.
Its own success undid that. Soho, St James's and Leicester Squares were all built in imitation of it, all further west and nearer the Court, and the fashionable went to them instead; within a generation the titles on the piazza had given way to artists, tradesmen and lodging-house keepers. The fruit and vegetable trade that had been drifting into the square was formalised in the meantime - the fifth Earl took letters patent in 1670 for the right to gather traders every day but Sunday and Christmas Day - and in 1705 it moved into the middle. The Bedfords left for Bloomsbury.
The market got a building of its own two centuries later. Charles Fowler's hall of 1828 to 1830 is granite, stock brick and stucco in three parallel ranges, twelve-bay Doric colonnades along the flanks, and a portico four columns deep at the east end under a pediment of urns: a neo-classical composition laid out for porters and barrows and then dressed in Greek.
The glass came later still, and most people take it for Fowler's. The open alleys between his ranges were roofed by Cubitt's in 1874 and again in 1888, on iron columns tied by skeleton arches under semicircular trusses - fifty years younger than the stone beneath them. The trade left for Nine Elms in 1974 and the Greater London Council restored the complex. Grade II* listed.
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Photo by Colin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons · Photo by The wub, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.