Market failure

Started a year ago with some fanfare, Wood Street Farmers’ Market has slowly withered away. For the first few months it served as a Christmas Market, with craft stalls to accompany the food stalls. It brought so much trade that many of the shops in Wood Street opened on the Sundays it was there. But after Christmas 2010, with most of the craft stalls gone, interest dropped. In late spring the food stalls started to abandon it too and the shops went back to being closed on Sundays. Now all that are left are a bread stall; two meat stalls — one selling burgers as a take-away as well as raw meat, the other just selling hot pork rolls — a photographer, and a burger stall selling candy floss.

In many ways Wood Street is the ideal place for a market, but with competition from the Sunday Farmers’ Market at the Designer Outlet — which many of the stallholders in Wood Street also attended — and little reason to visit Old Town on a Sunday apart from the market, it was always likely to struggle.