The market as it used to sound — and smell
On a market day in Grantham, before the change, the first thing you noticed was not the stalls or the traders but the sound beneath everything else. Diesel generators — the portable kind that powered the lighting rigs, the hot-food units, the PA systems — ran continuously from set-up to pack-down. At close range, that kind of engine produces somewhere between 75 and 90 decibels of broadband mechanical noise: not a sharp sound you can locate and tune out, but a low, pervasive drone closer in character to standing beside a lawnmower or a stretch of heavy traffic. It sat under every conversation.
The smell came with it. Diesel exhaust at idling speed carries particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, and in a confined market setting those pollutants gather at exactly the height where people are breathing. The odour is distinctive — acrid, slightly oily — and, unlike a noise source, it lingers in still air long after the engine that produced it has been throttled back.
Neither stressor announced itself as a problem. Both were ambient, unbroken, and treated as ordinary. Visitors could not step around them the way they might ease past a crowded stall. The sensory conditions were built into the space by the choice of power source — not incidentally, but as a direct consequence of how the market was designed to function.
South Kesteven District Council's decision to install a permanent underground power supply at Grantham Market Place — reported at approximately £275,000 — removed both conditions at source rather than managing around them.
Two stressors at once — and why that matters
Sound and smell are processed by separate physiological systems — one through the auditory pathway, the other through olfactory receptors. Eliminating a noise source does nothing to air quality, and cleaning the air does nothing to reduce auditory load. They are independent problems that happened, in this case, to share a single cause.
That shared cause — the diesel generator — is what made the underground supply such a clean solution. By routing permanent grid power below the market surface, the council removed both stressors in one decision: no separate acoustic mitigation project, no air-quality intervention added on top. The physical permanence of the installation — buried conduit, grid-connected — is precisely what makes this possible. A temporary workaround, such as quieter generators or exhaust extraction, would have eased one channel while leaving the other, or introduced a compensating penalty somewhere else.
Many infrastructure upgrades work that way: acoustic baffling can trap pollutants; new ventilation equipment introduces mechanical noise. The notable thing about routing power underground is that it dissolved both barriers without any such trade-off — which is why it functions as a design decision rather than a maintenance fix.
Who a generator quietly excludes
Three distinct groups face particular difficulty in a generator-powered market, and they face it for different reasons.
People with sensory processing differences — including those with autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, and dyspraxia — can experience sustained loud ambient noise not as an irritant but as a trigger for sensory overload: the body's atypical neural response when one or more senses receives more stimulation than it can process. Broadband mechanical drone is especially hard to filter out because it occupies the same frequency range as conversation. The olfactory channel adds a second concurrent stressor for the same group, since many individuals with sensory processing disorder may inadequately process smell as well as sound.
Hearing aid users encounter a different mechanism. Hearing aids amplify ambient sound indiscriminately: a generator's drone is boosted alongside speech, making it harder, not easier, to hold a conversation. The result is accelerated listening fatigue in precisely the environment where social and commercial interaction is the point.
People with respiratory conditions, and elderly visitors who are more sensitive to air quality generally, face the exhaust question independently of noise. Diesel particulate matter and nitrogen oxides gather at pedestrian breathing height in a confined market space — a barrier that has nothing to do with how loud the market is.
What connects these three groups is that none of them needs to request accommodation or disclose anything when the stressor is simply absent. The exclusion that generators created was passive and cumulative — people do not necessarily complain; they visit less, stay shorter, or quietly stop coming at all.
Infrastructure as a design ethics question
The Inclusive Design Research Center frames disability not as a property of the person but as a mismatch between what someone needs and what their environment provides. Under that framing, the generator-powered market was never a neutral baseline — it was a designed environment that excluded specific groups through the sensory conditions it created.
This reframe shifts the question. Rather than asking how to accommodate people with sensory sensitivities, it asks why the infrastructure was producing sensory barriers in the first place. The generator was not inevitable; it was a choice about how to power a public space, and that choice had consequences for who could comfortably use it.
The £275,000 permanent supply is therefore better understood as a correction than an addition. It does not layer an accessibility feature onto an otherwise neutral system — it removes a flaw from the prior design, one that went unidentified largely because its costs fell on groups whose exclusion tends to be quiet and gradual rather than visible or loudly complained about.
Inclusive design, as the Research Center defines it, extends to physical infrastructure as much as to products and interfaces. Routing power underground is, in that sense, an act of design with direct consequences for who can inhabit the space — and the choice to leave it as generators was equally an act of design, made without that awareness.
What sensory design actually involves
Sensory design, as a discipline, begins not with solutions but with diagnosis. The methodology calls for observing how a space is actually used and mapping users' positive and negative sensory experiences — sound, smell, touch, light — before any intervention is proposed. The output of that diagnosis is a perceptual profile: a picture of what it genuinely feels like to be in the space, rather than what it is intended to feel like.
The Grantham project did not describe itself in those terms. South Kesteven District Council framed the £275,000 investment in operational language — eliminating generator noise, removing diesel exhaust, improving conditions for traders and visitors. But the underlying logic is identical to sensory design methodology: two negative perceptual channels were identified and neutralised at source. That is sensory design, whether or not it was called that at the cabinet table.
The discipline has spread well beyond hospitals and schools, where sensory sensitivity is already expected, precisely because public markets and transport hubs present the same challenges: competing stimuli, hard surfaces that amplify sound, crowds that add unpredictability. Civic spaces like Grantham's Market Place sit within that broadening application — which is why the upgrade reads differently when placed in that context.
For other spaces across South Kesteven, the practical takeaway is simple: every public space has a perceptual profile, assembled by a series of decisions that were usually practical rather than deliberate. Knowing that a profile exists is the first step toward asking whether it is working.
What the Market Place offers now — and what it still cannot answer
The removal of generator noise and diesel exhaust means the market is now quieter and cleaner along two sensory axes that mattered most to its most excluded visitors — and it achieved this without requiring anyone to identify themselves, request accommodation, or navigate a formal process. That invisibility is the point. Cumulative accessibility works this way: the change is not announced; people simply find somewhere easier to use than it was before.
The evidence base for what has actually followed is thin — no footfall data, user testimony, or equalities impact assessment was publicly available for this piece — but the thinness of that evidence does not affect the design logic. What the infrastructure decision makes visible is a principle that applies across South Kesteven's other public spaces: power routing, acoustic treatment, surface materials, and signage placement are all choices with human consequences, made constantly, and mostly without deliberate intention. This project made one of those choices legible.
On a quiet Tuesday morning in Grantham's Market Place, none of that will be visible. The stalls will go up, the traders will arrive, and the space will simply work. That is what a corrected design looks like from the outside — unremarkable, because the barrier it removed was never remarked upon either.
- [1] Diesel exhaust. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=1202358 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=1202358
- [2] Air pollution. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=10934212 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=10934212
- [3] Sensory overload. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=2308124 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=2308124
- [4] Sensory processing disorder. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=53638298 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=53638298
- [5] Health effects from noise. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=4450529 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=4450529
- [6] Autism-friendly. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=36929890 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=36929890
- [7] Inclusive design. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=1718492 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=1718492
- [8] Noise pollution. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=66599 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=66599
- [9] Sensory design. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=32251796 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=32251796
- [10] Grantham. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=152678 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=152678