Castle Market.

Castle Market photo © Copyright David Dixon and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

In a tragedy for all lovers of rampantly lunatic architecture, Sheffield's Castle Market was closed down last week, to be replaced by a spanking new indoor market at the bottom of the Moor. From comments on various sites, it seems few'll miss it.

But I certainly will.

I'll miss it for three reasons.

One was that I have happy childhood memories of it. I got my first ever box of Lego there, from a stall that had a Lego model of Queen Elizabeth as its centrepiece. I got a Dalek money box from there - possibly from the same stall. I also got a machine gun (admittedly not a real one) from the market, and a banjo. Truly it was a place of many and magical delights for a child.

Secondly, in the good old days it had a pet shop in one of the units that lined the building's ground floor exterior. That shop's downstairs holds no great memories for me but the upstairs had goldfish and snakes. No trip to town was complete without a trip to see the snakes.

The other reason is that it's a building that makes no sense at all. So random is its exterior that it's impossible to close your eyes and imagine walking round the outside of it. It's like a whole bunch of different buildings have collided with each other through some process of continental drift.

Likewise with its oddly labyrinthine interior that left you with the feeling you could roam it every hour of every day of your life and somehow still never fully know it. There'd always be some nook, some cranny, you'd never before encountered. That might not have it a sensible design for a market building but it did mean it was impossible to get bored by it.

I assume it's a truly unique building because I can't believe anyone would ever have been daft enough to build another market anything like it but, of course, that means the complexity and randomness that made it a bizarre design for a market also made it seem oddly special.

Don Valley Stadium.

Photo by Matthew Hatton [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Some things in life seem designed to make you feel old.

Don Valley Stadium is one of them.

When they knocked down the old Egg Box Town Hall extension, around a decade ago, I suddenly got a glimpse of what it is to be mortal, as it was the first building I ever saw demolished that I'd seen being built in the first place. Thanks to that, I was suddenly aware of the passage of time in a way I'd never been before.

Since then, various things that were built in my childhood have fallen by the wayside but now, as though to rub it in, they're demolishing things that were built in my mid-twenties. What kind of madness is this? It's the sort of thing that could make one feel old enough to be Methuselah.

As for the stadium, it was a pretty thing, blessed with a roof of airy elegance - and clearly the UK's biggest and best athletics stadium for around twenty years. But, despite being used for a million and one other things, it hardly ever seemed to get used for what it had been built for - international athletics. With a need to cut spending and another smaller stadium nearby, I suppose it's inevitable it was going to get the chop but it's hard to escape the feeling of a wasted opportunity and to wonder just what it was the athletics authorities had against it, that prevented them granting it any events.

Sheffield's Lyceum Theatre.

Photo copyright Gregory Deryckére . Re-used under this Creative Commons License.

When it was announced in the late 1980s that they were going to do up and re-open the Lyceum Theatre, I thought it was madness. What a squalid and appalling looking building it was, surely fit only for demolition.

But what a fool I was. For it wasn't just re-opened, it was transformed into a thing almost unrecognisable, changing into something vaguely reminiscent of an overgrown cake.

I must admit that my entire experience of having been inside the Lyceum is of attending a version of Dick Whittington starring Vince Hill in the late 1960s. This would have made me four at the time, meaning it's remarkable that my memories of the visit are so clear.

I remember Vince striding around with his worldly possessions dangling in a spotted hanky from the end of a stick.

I remember his cat looking suspiciously like a woman in a costume. I was most impressed by her tail.

Most of all I remember my nan telling me the theatre's boxes were for visiting royalty, like the queen, to sit in. I can confess I was highly disappointed that the queen didn't show up for that performance.

And you know what? She's not shown up in my life at any other point either. Grrr.