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The 18th Century Market House is a handsome building prominently sited in the attractive Somerset town of Martock. It has served the community with a variety of uses from the original function of a meeting room, shelter for market traders and site for the stocks, to a fire station and more recently a public toilets and hang-out for local adolescents.

As times move-on needs change. The recent refurbishment is a sympathetic intervention to suit the building for an intelligent response to current requirements, without detriment to it’s historic qualities. The glass ‘goldfish bowl’ inserted behind the arches is manned by volunteers as a visitor information point and to help locals access public services through IT and a programme of clinics. The first floor meeting room has been stripped-back and refurbished to reveal it’s elegant proportions. Accessibility has been considered in the redesign of the toilets and insertion of a lift.

The Market House is physically at the centre of the town and the refurbishment project is an elegantly simple architectural scheme that has enabled fulfilment of an imaginative idea by the Parish Council for the use of the building to be at heart of the community.