Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
‘Bring back our boot fair’
The future of a hugely popular car boot fair remains in limbo - as stallholders highlight its importance and hope it will be allowed to resume.
The weekly Sunday event at Wincheap park and ride was forced to shut at the start of the pandemic.
It later emerged it was at risk of permanent closure, as park and ride services could begin running from the site on Sundays.
The city council says that while this has not happened, it may yet introduce Sunday services at the site, so the future of the boot fair is still in doubt. But Barry Stone, who regularly ran a stall at the event, is calling for it to go ahead. He argues the weekly event is hugely important. “People can earn a bit of money, it’s recycling things,” he said. “But the main thing is the social aspect. That’s especially important after this last year.” He added that it would offer an open-air option for people who do not feel comfortable shopping indoors during the pandemic, and give people who “can’t afford the shops in Canterbury” a cheaper alternative. “It’s going to bring extra people into the city because people come from all over Kent,” he said.
At the city council’s annual budget-setting full council meeting in February, councillors decided not to extend park and ride services to cover Sundays at Wincheap, due to the authority’s “very difficult financial position”.
But using its newly created parking incentives fund, the council is offering free park and ride at the site on the last Sunday of each month until September. Spokesman Rob Davies said: “In addition, we have received ‘welcome back’ funding from the government, which is a pot of cash to help town and city centres get back on their feet as Covid restrictions ease. “One of the options we are currently looking at is using some of this money to fund services at Wincheap on all the other Sundays that the free service is not running.
“All of this means we are not yet in a position to give boot fair fans and traders a definitive verdict on whether it can return, but we understand there is a lot of interest in this and will publicise the final decision as soon as we can.”