All supermarkets are determined to get planning permission for new stores and extensions to existing ones, and it is amazing how often they manage to get what they want, despite the well-known fact that peripheral development of big retail centres is followed by correspondingly less footfall in adjacent town centres.
As a market trader myself for the past 47 years, may I say I have seen the life of Northampton's town centre draining away. This is a familiar story throughout many parts of the UK. When the big supermarkets move in, towns and city centres are pushed to the tipping point.
I'm not a politician but I may be one day. Then I'd cap the size of all supermarkets, and tax them more for all their acres of parking spaces.
Local.
Tony 'Go to Milton Keynes' Woods and Richard 'Cafe Culture' Church.
Woods has never made a secret of the fact that he would like to see the Market Square empty of all stalls rather than see a busy market taking place. But our market is an essential attraction to our town centre, and if it wasn't there the town centre footfall would be even less than it is now.
We have seen markets beggared about with by people like Woods in Kettering, Corby and Wellingborough. Today all those local markets are a shadow of their former selves, in fact some of them hardly exist. Wellingborough recently dropped its rents to £7 a stall to try to get traders in. The lesson is clear: every time you move a market around or break it up it shrinks, traders leave, less customers come, and it staggers further down the road to extinction. Woods has never stood a market in his life; he should come down and try it for a week or so to find out what it's all about. Better still he should resign and leave the running of the market to people who know what they are doing.
Church has the interesting habit of talking about the Market Square without mentioning the market which takes place there every working day. He did this at some length at our last Annual General Meeting, to the consternation and annoyance of the many traders present. Eventually somebody pulled him up on this, and he made some excuse of including the market whenever he spoke about the Square. But he was only talking about the Square and its history, and the fine buildings, and what a fine open expanse it presented, etc; there was nothing about the history of the market, the market traders who have brought in customers to the town centre for 800 years, and the future of the market itself. Soon after being pulled up he lapsed again, and once more only the open Square existed, with groups of coffee-tables here and there, where middle-class Liberal-Democrat politicians eased themselves with cups of latté after a hard day in Cabinet.
What can you do with someone like this? I'd like him to resign along with Woods: they could go into business running a market stall together, doing fruit & vegetables perhaps; that would certainly bring them back into the real world!
Worldwide.
Good riddance to G.W.B.
However glad we all may be to see the last of George W. Bush and his hatchet man Dick Cheney, we all know that Obama cannot meet the sky-high expectations held by his fervent admirers. But when he does make mistakes, as he will, the world will still be a better place with the Texas oil men gone. 'Good riddance to them' is what I say. They ruled for far too long.
To finish this time, I'd like to thank all those people in the United States who read this blog. I've looked at the statistics for this site and I'm pleasantly surprised there are so many of you. Thanks for reading this folks, that's all for now.
