Centre of trade setting out its stall to remain the gateway to the Dales
Skipton’s long history as a market town is witnessing a resurgence with plans to attract more people to its streets. David Behrens reports.
THE ENTRANCE to Morrisons on Broughton Road is a subtle homage to the heritage of Lower Wharfedale. Built in the shape of a ring, it stands on the spot of the old cattle mart, where the auctioneer’s bid calling cut through the chatter of the Dalesmen in cloth caps who pressed against the railings.
It is three decades now since the market moved a mile up the Gargrave Road, but Skipton remains in every sense a market town, for both the agricultural and wider communities.
The hubbub at the new cattle mart has been subdued of late, as beasts are bought and sold in the presence of essential personnel only. Even so, the sheepdog sales that are also held there – the only such forum for them in Yorkshire – have managed to attract national attention for the technology they have pioneered. The buyers now are not huddled in a ring but scattered to the four winds.
“Someone in the Faroe Islands was watching one dog on YouTube and bought it over the phone,” says Jeremy Eaton, the mart’s general manager.
In February, a shepherdess from Northumberland sold her sheepdog for £18,900 to a cattle farmer in Oklahoma, and at the latest sale last month, buyers and sellers were able to talk to each other on Zoom before the bidding began.
Yet though animal sales are part of the fabric of Skipton, they are also a world apart. Over the decades, the scale and size of the auctions have meant they have had to move progressively further from the town centre, where the market square is now filled three days a week by stalls of a more recognisable nature.
It was not always thus. The first cattle markets took place in the middle of the cobbled High Street, with animals spilling out on to the surrounding roads. Later they were moved to an open air market behind the Town Hall, before the old mart on Broughton Road gave them a permanent home conveniently close to the cattle wagons of the railway station. It stood for nearly a century.
“We have spent a lot of time trying to reconnect with the town itself since moving from there,” says Mr Eaton. “The mart is obviously important for the agricultural community – it’s a vital part of their business – but it’s also important for Skipton itself. It brings a lot of customers into the area who then stay in the town.”
When animals are absent, the mart is sometimes used for arts and craft exhibitions which attract a clientele that may never have witnessed a livestock auction.
“We see it as important because it connects people not only to us but also to the food chain,” Mr Eaton says.
The auction house moved to its present location in 1990 because expansion on the old site was deemed unfeasible and the transport of animals by train no longer necessary. But its relocation to the fringe of the town centre was symbolic of the economic shift Skipton itself was seeing. Its prosperity today is underpinned by tourism as much as by agriculture, and it has adopted a forensic approach to marketing itself.
Andrew Mear, a property owner who chairs the town’s Business Improvement District, talks of modernising what he calls “the new Skipton” whilst retaining the traditional feel of the Gateway to the Dales.
“It’s like an England of old in some ways,” he says. “Life might be a bit slower, but people are nicer.”
Yet it is often younger consumers who are the biggest spenders, he points out. “So we have free wifi across the town for young people to access the same services they would in a big city.”
Some of the other innovations are designed to be less visible.
“It’s amazing what technology can do nowadays. We’re investing in a new CCTV system which collects data on what people are doing and where the footfall is,” Mr Mear says.
It’s not a question of spying but of intelligently gathering marketing information that local traders can make use of, he argues.“Town centres have to adapt to stay relevant. We need all the data we can get.”
The latest development, however, has seen Skipton reembrace its roots by closing the high street to traffic on market days to give shoppers free rein.
Mr Mear says he had long argued for such an arrangement, sometimes against opposition.
“I’d always been told it would be too difficult to implement – but suddenly Covid made things possible. We had to get the market back on its feet and so ways were found to close the street to traffic between 10 and four on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The pandemic has made people wake up.”
The arrangement has not been universally popular with stallholders, but Mr Mear would like to see it made permanent.
“The other Friday the sun was shining and people were sitting out with no worry about traffic, and there was a completely different feel to the town. It was much more European.”
Ambience counts for a lot, he says. “It’s the leisure industry that will save the high streets. People will be drawn to Skipton because it’s a nice place to be, and they will do some shopping while they’re here.
“For retail to survive, it has to have that leisure element, and while Skipton has a lot, it could do with more.”
In particular, he says, it needs a hotel in the town centre, and he would have dearly liked to apply his property development skills to turning the old Rackhams department store into one after it closed last year. As it is, it has been taken by another retailer.
He is happy enough to harness the town’s agricultural heritage to promote its presentday offering, though. “We had a campaign a few years ago called Flock to Skipton,” he says. “When the present problems are behind us, I’d like to relaunch it to persuade people to flock back here.”