Old Market Hall

This guide to the Old Market Hall in Helsinki starts with a stone carving above the entrance: the date eighteen eighty-eight, cut into the facade before the building was actually finished. You'll hear why Helsinki decided to move its food trade indoors, worried about hygiene and unpoliced meat and fish sales spilling across the open square, and how architect Gustaf Nystrom toured market halls across Europe before drawing up the plans. It follows the scramble among merchants for the one hundred and twenty stalls when the hall finally opened, and how the design was later copied elsewhere in the Russian Empire. Listen near the fish counters, where the queues still form.