Confessions of a Market User

by Les May

MY wife and I visit three markets every week.  Thursday is Todmorden for the ‘flea’ market. Today I spent the princely sum of 40p. But as usual we also bought meat, magazines, newspapers and coffee, either on the ‘inside’ market or in the town.  Total spend about £25-£30.   Friday is Heywood market for food for my pigeons, bread and cheese.  There’s also newspapers in one of the local shops and frequently a visit to a building society.  Total spend about £10 plus helping someone kept in employment at the building society.  Next stop each Friday is Bury market for fruit, vegetables, and usually fish and toiletries.  Add in coffee and a few odds and ends in the town, plus a supermarket visit and total spend is £35-£40+.  So every week we are taking £70-£80 out of the town which we could be spending in Rochdale, adding to the town’s prosperity and halting its decline.  So why don’t we?

The answer is simple.   There’s little or nothing to interest us in any longer visiting Rochdale town centre, unless we have to.  It wasn’t always like this.  In the past it was our regular Saturday destination.  For me the crunch came when the market stalls were kicked out of the site they had occupied since the mid 1970s.   Ironically the vegetable stall I use in Bury, moved there after that enforced move.  If you cannot attract people like me to visit the town centre I’m not going to be around to spend money in any of the new shops or indeed in the superabundance of old shops from the last ‘development’.

Would a six month reprieve for Rochdale market do any good?  Probably not and for a very good reason.  My brother ran a fruit and vegetable stall on Rochdale market for 35 years, first on the ‘old’ Yorkshire Street/Toad Lane site and then on the ‘new’ mid 1970s site.   For the first two years after the move business was slow. But once the ‘new’ market got established it gave him a very good living. What market traders need is the certainty that having put the effort into building up a regular trade it’s not going to be wasted by someone pulling to plug on them.

A town that cannot maintain a successful market is unlikely to be able to maintain a successful clutch of large stores.   It’s all about ‘footfall’ and too many people are voting with their feet.

***************