Inside the new multi-million pound performance and market venue being built in Oldham

The multi-million pound project to create a new home for Oldham’s Tommyfield Market is nearing completion.

The Local Democracy Reporting Service received a sneak preview as the new venue off Yorkshire Street enters its final phase of construction. 

The building site next to Spindles Town Square Shopping Centre, which was purchased by the council in 2020 for £9.5m, will become the new home to seventy Oldham traders from the borough’s historic market by Spring 2025. 

But across the venue’s 450k square metres, visitors will also find a banquet hall and performance space, three bars and a publicly accessible local history archive. 

The project will replace the current Tommyfield Market site on Albion Street, which is due to be turned into housing, a park and the new Eton Star Academy school, and the Queen Elizabeth Hall event space, which will be demolished as part of plans to create 2,000 new homes in Oldham. 

Situated on the land of the former TJ Hughes department store, the exterior of the building is nearly finished, with an extension of Parliament Square to be created on its doorstep. The interior of the space is taking shape too, with a ‘feature staircase’ recognisable from the CGI designs. 

These will be surrounded on the ground floor by a food court and bar, leading to a staircase to the lower floor. The basement will house Oldham’s local studies archives, which will be fully accessible to the public for the first time in the council’s history. 

Upstairs, the ‘gala room’ is already fully equipped with a lighting rig for gigs and performances and room partitions to split the space into smaller parts for different sized functions. 

A large room on the first floor connected to the shopping centre is where the majority of market traders are due to be moved to – from butchers to clothes stores. Stalls are due to be designed in consultation with the traders in the coming months. 

The relocation of Tommyfield Market, along with the completed redesign of Spindles, were partly funded through £24.5m of the government’s Towns Fund. 

Local MP Jim McMahon, who also took a tour of the building, said: “I’ve seen so many examples of where over many generations town centres have been redeveloped and the market gets pushed further and further to the edge of town. In the end it gets pushed so far to the end it doesn’t survive. 

“What the council has done in Oldham is reverse that completely and say [to market traders] the town’s future has to have you at the heart of it. I’m excited. Every politician likes a building site but it’s more than that.

“I see seventy stalls for seventy stall holders and their staff bringing their customer base to repopulate a shopping centre that had been struggling to find its future. I think for an indoor market to be a part of a town’s future instead of its past, that is special.” 

Council boss Arooj Shah said the construction progress that she’s been ‘following closely’ was “breathtaking”. 

Coun Shah said: “This is proving to [residents] that not only are there spades in the ground but we are delivering the vision they deserve and we don’t give up on places like Oldham. All the jigsaw pieces are coming together now.” 

While there were teething troubles regarding the transition for traders into the new hall earlier this year, the town hall boss claims that ‘relationships are now really positive’. 

“We want them to thrive,” she said. “This new space will not just be aspirational for them, it will put people in the town because Oldham is a market town. I will never take that away.”