Miraculous Markets

One of the great highlights of urban tourism, is a visit to a city’s central market. For there is little than can match the sensual pleasure of wandering around labyrinthine aisles overflowing with tasty things to touch, smell, eat and drink. The covered  market off the Barcelona Ramblas is just such a place, as essential as the obligatory visit to Gaudi’s cathedral, and a trip to Leeds or Newcastle is not complete without drifting through the Kirkgate and Grainger markets, gems of structural engineering which have somehow survived the twin forces of population flight and supermarket sheds. Glasgow has been less lucky, its markets have endured, but as music venues and bars rather than sellers of fresh produce. The emergence  of interior markets in the mid nineteenth century was a response to three things. First, to provide safe shopping venues for a growing middle class intimidated by unregulated street stalls. Second, to provide food security, ensuring that products were fresh and free from disease, and third to bring retail into the orbit of capital with the development of organised commerce based on precise measurement and price controls. There was a fourth element as well; spectacle. The ritual display of commodities, resplendent with graphic iconography, was as essential to the early development of consumer culture as it is now, and like the cast-iron and glass Arcades, the large covered markets could be palatial and architecturally innovative in their use of iron, steel, timber and concrete to create wide span structures of often cathedral size proportions. The pictures here are of Belo Horizonte’s magnificent Mercado Central. It is worth visiting the city simply to spend the day sampling all the different cheeses and cachacas for which Minas Gerais is famous. It is an emporium where it appears as if the whole world is for sale. Knives, birds, religious artefacts, magic herbs, ingredients for feijoada, arrays of tropical fruit, and my favourite place of all, Ponto da Empada, Pie Shop. I was brought up on pasties and cannot resist food wrapped in pastry. The pies here are sensational. Crumbling buttery pastry stuffed with a filling of your choice; chicken, sun dried beef, olives, and my personal favourite, Bacalhau, salted cod, washed down with icy fresh lemonade.