Kettering traders hope for better times after town's hardships
Ms Farrar-Hayton is the co-owner of Irregular Art Hub, one of a number of small businesses located in the The Yards shopping quarter off Market Street.She said that the town's high street looked "sad" at first glance, but added that "once you scratch the surface there are a lot of people who really care about the town"."Lots of people locally are really trying to bring out the good in Kettering," she said."There's a lot of litter picks, like the big Kettering clean, and people just coming out and they're always painting columns around the town centre and really sprucing up the town, so people do really care."It's definitely faced a lot of hardship and a lot of places have shut down. There's not many local independent shops apart from at The Yards."
Mark James, who co-owns Irregular Art Hub with Ms Farrar-Hayton, said: "I think people always like the phrases 'use it or lose it' and 'shop local', but it's really easy and we're all guilty of just going online [to shop]."I think that people do need to back local and shop local if they want to have these things on their doorstep."
Another trader at The Yards, Lindsey Atkins, said she wanted the shells of shops previously occupied by big names, such as the former Gala Bingo Hall, to be repurposed to provide services which better served the town's community.The bingo hall closed in 2018 and Ms Atkins and her business partner Beccy Hurrell have proposed a scheme to transform the space into a mixture of health services, a cafe, performing arts spaces, and a music venue.However, progress on the project, which has been backed by local singer Mae Stephens, has been hindered by funding issues.Ms Atkins and Ms Hurrell, who run Beccy Hurrell Voice and Arts, lost out on funding they had applied for when there was a change of government last year, but they remain hopeful.
Ms Atkins said: "The main reason we're hopeful is because the people want it, the town wants it, everybody we speak to wants it. The business owners want it. "We don't want to do this as a quick fix for now. We wanted to do something for the longevity and the future, and the communities within Kettering and North Northamptonshire as a whole. So 100% [we] believe something can be done."
Other traders share the feeling of optimism.Kate Oslizlok, from the Eunice Artisan Bakery - also located at The Yards after previously trading in the town's market - said that although the departure of traditional big names from the high street had been a blow, it had opened up the opportunity to champion local businesses."The small local businesses, we all believe that it's going to be better," she said. "When we opened the bakery here, the other traders [were] saying that they didn't see that many people [shopping] around here previously."We just brought our customers with us [and they] realised that something [other independent shops] are around going on. "Hopefully, all the units will be full of local traders. That's the most important thing."
For the town council, factors such as the Covid pandemic and the growth of online shopping have had a big impact."It is a very difficult time. I think that towns have changed over the last sort of one to two decades," Watkiss said."What we're trying to do though is look positively at the future and at how we can shape the town centre for what the community wants."So looking at probably bringing more leisure into the town centre... bringing other sort of units into the town, maybe like NHS units, might be things like GP surgeries, dental surgeries - but anything that can generate footfall into the town."I think that everything that we're looking at doing as a parish council is working towards working with all the stakeholders and making this a town that people are proud of, want to invest in, and that people want to visit."
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