Friday, 12 July, 2002

John Sheard awards plans for the renaissance of market towns a cautious welcome - but has an optimistic view for their future.

YORKSHIRE Forward, the regional development agency, this week announced a £2.8 million programme which, it claims, will become a stepping-stone towards the future for up to 40 market towns in the county.

Teams of international experts are to be called in to work with local people and one of the key aims is to identify just what role a given town plays in its own hinterland and how this can be turned into foundations on which to build a niche market for its future prosperity.

Now I don't intend to go into the jargon these planners use - mainly because I don't understand it - but here, I hope, is a golden opportunity for the planning professionals to win back some of the respect they lost for the wholesale disasters they created from the 1960s onwards.

Then, they devastated many of our major towns and cities. Fortunately, by the time they turned their evil eye onto our small country towns, their follies had been exposed. However, that did not mean that market towns had escaped a long period of relative decline, some of it self-inflicted.

For a start, what exactly is a market town? Let's consider three examples I know well: Skipton, Settle and Kirkby Lonsdale. Although the latter is not in Yorkshire and therefore not part of the renaissance project, it has much in common with the other two as the A65 joins them all.

If the definition depends on towns which have regular livestock sales - the old idea of a market town - Skipton still applies but Settle and Kirkby don't: they lost their marts years ago. If it means a town where there is still a street market, all of them qualify.

But that would mean that Ilkley could also be included and is Ilkley still a market town in its own right or merely a commuter base for people who work in Leeds or Bradford?

Skipton is at present going through something of a boom, thanks to the expansion of the Skipton Building Society and its subsidiaries. But its High Street has been decimated as a shopping area, now dominated by banks, building societies, charity shops, opticians and mobile phone vendors. They run coach trips from Merseyside to Skipton by advertising it as "the charity shop capital of the North." Is that what Skiptonians really want?

Settle, too, has had its ups and downs in recent years, with much squabbling amongst the local business community, but now it is leading the way in Craven by getting its act together and working as a team. A look at the town's new website, or a chat with the new economic development manager who is being paid out of EU funds, suggests that Settle is a town that the Yorkshire Forward team should look at with some interest.

As for Kirkby, it is in danger of becoming a retirement home for wealthy offcumdens and its famous High Street is still reeling from the shock of competition from the newly opened Booth's supermarket, with small, locally owned businesses closing or changing hands on an almost weekly basis.

Now I have great affection for all these three towns and don't want them changed a lot. I would like them to survive, however, as prosperous centres for services, shopping and leisure.

If this market town renaissance project is to work, the planners need to look at some key issues. These include:

• Rate relief and a re-thinking of business taxes, so that real shops can survive, owned and managed by local people

• More architecturally excellent in-fill housing schemes, like Victoria Mill in Skipton, rather than green-field developments in the Dales

• Tighter planning controls on supermarkets to prove that they are needed and then allowed to sell only food, rather than clothing, newspapers, electrical goods etc

• Encouragement for hi-tech support systems like broadband IT access, along with a kick up the backside for BT for its anti-competitive monopoly on communications hardware

• And an advertising/PR campaign to convince managers in Leeds, Bradford and Manchester that they can operate modern business from market towns - it's cheaper and cuts out commuting.

Get some of these things in place and I shall take an optimistic view of the future for the Yorkshire market town as one of the most pleasant places to live in this already green and pleasant land. We shall see...