SHADOW OVER THE MARKET SQUARE
I presently employ 3 staff who have worked for me, one for 30 years, one for 15 years, and my son 8 years; all of which have young families. We all work hard to pay our way in life. I’m not only losing everything I’ve worked for, but laying off my staff will really hurt me, because they have worked hard for me through the good times and the bad times of Market trading over the past years.....
This Tory council are moving us down to Commercial Street for a period of two years. But we market traders have had no say in the matter: the council say they have engaged with us but without doubt they have not listened to us. I've got 15,000 signatures from the people of Northampton who cannot understand the waste of public money and the logic of moving us down to the edge of town. When we could be moved around the market like they did before during previous work. They say it will delay the project and add to the financial cost.
We already have had two failed attempts to put a fountain on the Market Square, the last one by the disgraced Council leader and former Tory MP David McIntosh. Now they want to put another on our Market at circa £668,000 and a yearly running cost of £50,000 per annum. We are in the middle of a cost of living crisis where many are struggling to put food on the table and frightened to put on their heating on... I’m 72 years old and I don’t remember the UK and Northampton being in a more desperate state that it is today, and I lived through the Blair and Thatcher years.
The anti social behaviour, the street drinkers, the people living in doorways, the drug dealers, are all part of the decline of our Town Centre. You report these things to the Council and the Police and nothing is ever done about them. But the town planners think all these concerns will go away because they are spending £8.5 million on the Square. I have told them things will be worse with all the new seating areas they are adding in their plans; that much should be obvious. The Tories have once again shown how out of touch with the public they are.
Our moving date is now January 2023, and I can safely predict the cleverest Market trader in the World will not get a living down there, especially if it is a harsh winter. Have they got a plan B? They are convinced it will work down there, or perhaps they only say they are; perhaps in reality they just want to finish us all off by a process of hopeless attrition. I’m not a Bookmaker but if I was the odds would be 1000/1 against most of us surviving just one winter, let alone two. They say I’m thinking of myself and I’m against progress, but the market place is a historical part of Northampton and we should embrace it. Boris Johnson at the 2019 General Election pledged funds to Town Centres like Northampton, which is already the on edge of survival, and the Market revamp will push it over the edge. So I’m asking the new incoming Prime Minster to take a second look at what's happening in Northampton.
It's a lot of people's opinion that the Council don’t want a Market any more on the Square: well I’m beginning to wonder if that’s true, because I currently pay for 8 stalls ever day 52 weeks a year. But in the new layout of the market by the council officers that are handling this project, they say I will be offered 3 stalls in the new market and no more, and that's not negotiable! Just shows what they know about Market trading. I’m not against change or progress; that’s why my business has survived the past thirty years, but we need people running our market that know the game and care about the future of our town before it is too late, and sadly we will have lost another huge chunk of our Town Centre history.