Part of this Northampton Blink festival involves exhibiting artistic sculptures on the market square, inside the very market itself. To make way for this, some twenty stalls have had to be moved to the bottom of the market, and several regular traders have had their businesses turned upside-down for at least two weeks, and face a big downturn in trade.
Trade at the bottom of the market is poor, mainly because nobody knows which traders are there; customers looking for them in their regular spot will see an empty space and think they haven't come. There are no signs to say they have been moved, or where they've moved to. There is unlikely to be any compensation from the borough council either, for these unfortunate traders. Quite why the sculptures could not be exhibited within the events area at the bottom of the Square has not been answered, and no logical and sensible explanation has been forthcoming from the borough council.
Despite this bad start, you cannot blame the artists themselves, who no doubt had little say in where they were going. As usual somebody way up in the council who decides these things had got it wrong again, as they frequently do. It is so much more sensible to consult with the people at the workface, but the present council rarely put themselves out doing this. Our market committee was strongly opposed to the present arrangement, and rightly so, but what they said at meetings went unheeded by those who decide market policy.
I went and had a look at the sculptures myself, and chatted with the charming Laura Ellen Bacon, who was working on them. Very nicely done, I think, and you could see the influence of willow-weaving in the basic structural shape and form. But the sculpture of steel and blue ribbons did not take up a quarter of the huge space alloted to it, so why did they take down so many stalls? At a maximum, ten stalls would have been quite enough, instead of twenty.
However one point was evident; the market seemed to look bigger and better with a space in the centre, and this is perhaps how it could have been designed when they wanted an events area in the first place. This would also have had the effect of being more selective of events. Because most of the traders would have been much closer to the events, loud and noisy events would have been completely out of the window.
Most of traders' complaints about events have been to do with noise, so given a space where noise was not an option, this would have resulted in many more market-friendly events, which in turn would have brought more shoppers in. It's something we should consider for the future, after these wasteful Liberal Democrats have been chucked out next year.
