A polemic on farmers' markets by Ross Clark in The Times set me thinking about food, Ludlow and a spat with a spokesman for the big supermarkets. I was arguing on Radio Oxford a few months back for a return to locally sourced food and locally owned shops. "Supermarkets are your local shops," the spokesman thundered in response to my plea. Sadly, for many areas of Britain, he is right.
I have just moved to Clun from a village outside Bicester in Oxfordshire. Bicester is a Tesco Town, with six identikit red, white and blue Tesco stores selling identikit food. Few local shops survive but Bicester, an almost unlovable town, has one saving grace—a farmers' market. Once a month shoppers can buy locally made bread so nice you can eat it raw and Gloucester Old Spot sausages that spit with flavour in the pan.
The downside, as Ross Clarke pointed out, is that farmers' markets are not held every day and can be bleak in bad weather. So Clark called for the markets to be put indoors into a "Farmers' Supermarkets" and to open them all hours. He is wrong.
The "shop 'til you drop" culture has turned shopping into a bleak experience. We shamble along aisles hunting for bargains while ignoring other people. We buy more than we need, lured by "buy two get one free" offers (and we throw one-third of the food we buy into the bin). We grit our teeth at the checkout in frustration at the queue and curse silently as "cheap" items mount up to an oversize bill.
It will get worse. The Competition Commission has proposed easing planning rules to get more competition among supermarkets. Its idea of a fair retail market is more and more supermarkets, and the Commission seems not to care that this will drive the remaining local shops to the wall.
Local shops and markets are vital because they are part of the fabric of the local community. Buy local and nine of the ten pounds you spend stops in the local economy with local people. Buy at a supermarket and nine out of the ten pounds flies outwards into the global economy. Buy local meat and vegetables and you support local farmers, as well as the landscape that they work to protect and we enjoy at our leisure. Buy at a local newsagent and you get the gossip of the day, as well as the national headlines. But in a supermarket, the latest "innovations" of home delivery and self-checkout (where you do the work you thought you were paying others to do) mean that you can get through the whole experience without saying a word to anyone. These services are only popular because supermarket shopping has become so unpleasant and soulless.
And that is what disappoints me about Ludlow. The Food Centre sells great local food, more than three-quarters is from Shropshire, but shopping there is not a "local experience". It is a wishy-washy place with no more ambience than a Tesco and is not a place to meet local people in a local environment. Worse, the town, home to "Local to Ludlow", now has four Costa Coffee shops. Four identikit experiences, four coffee houses where you could be anywhere in England and not a trace of Ludlow about them.
How soon before Costa Coffee or Tesco comes to Clun? Can our town keep its local shops? It can if we keeping using them.
Andy Boddington
Published in the Clun Chronicle, December 2007