Market Arcade in Newport in pictures, as restoration beckons

While the city, and formerly town, centre of which it is a part has developed and in some cases been demolished around it, the arcade has endured, although in recent times it has not been a place in which many shoppers have been inclined to linger.

That is what the seven-figure restoration project due to begin later this month will seek to change.

Work will include the restoration of the shopfronts and refurbishment of the glazed canopy.

The arcade will remain open while the work, which is due to completed next year, is carried out.

The National Lottery - through its Heritage Lottery Find arm - was sufficiently impressed with those restoration plans to, in 2018, award £1.1 million towards the cause and Cadw and the Welsh Government are also involved.

Those who have driven this project - and Newport City Council has spent several years working with the multiple owners of property and businesses in the arcade to get to this point - hope that it will reveal the long hidden Victorian gem beneath the currently uninspiring surfaces.

The arcade is entering its 150th year, having been built in 1869 as a pedestrian link between the railway station and the then-new provisions market. The arcade was given a makeover and expanded in 1905.

One of the photographs reproduced below, from the late 1970s, shows a sign that neatly sums up that function, albeit modified for a more vehicular age - 'covered way to provision market and bus station'.

Here then is a brief look back in pictures at the Market Arcade and its environs through the years to the present day.

A late 19th Century or early 20th Century photograph of Fennell's - fish, game and ice merchants - at 11 High Street, Newport. In its early days, the Market Arcade was known as Fennell's Arcade, after this shop which was next to the northern entrance/exit

This is how the top of Newport's High Street, including the Market Arcade, looked in 1977. Fennell's shop was immediately to the left of the arcade entrance/exit. Note the arcade sign referred to earlier. The boarded up building to the right of Town Talk - now occupied by Le Pub - is the former South Wales Argus headquarters

The Market Arcade photographed by the South Wales Argus in September 1993. The accompanying story told of how it had become a haven for drug users and dealers

A pigeon's eye view of the Market Arcade taken for a South Wales Argus story in 2006. It is unclear what is going to happen to the patterned, tiled floor

And here are some of the pigeons for whom the Market Arcade is home or at least a place to keep dry. This photograph, showing the arcade's Victorian glazed canopy, was taken in 2015

August 2016, and a sole shopper makes his way through the largely shuttered arcade

June 2018 - note the 'established 1905' under the Market Arcade sign. This was the date when the original Victorian arcade was expanded

The Market Arcade, February 7 2020. A 'now' photograph to the earlier 1977 picture. Fennell's - after which the arcade was known in the early days - occupied the space taken by Popadoms and Crazy Diamond. Picture: David Barnes