The Market Place Replaced By Offices

In my little town there is a market place. For seven hundred years a market was held regularly in the market place.
For hundreds of years we peasants would bring our wares to sell at market.
Until twenty years ago, that is.
Then the market was moved to a car park on the edge of the shopping area, and it consequently declined.
Part of the area of the market place ran alongside the Victorian town hall.
The offices of the local bureaucrats were no longer big enough, so the market was moved, and a new town hall extension was built.
The market was replaced by the seemingly more important work of pen pushing and paper shuffling. The coarse and common people who manned the market were pushed aside to make way for the nice council officers.
The town centre was no longer vibrant. It is slowly dying.
Now human interaction squeezes in where the bureaucrats allow, a little microcosm of the whole country.