Oswestry21

Hereford old livestock market/retail area 

It’s Our City campaign encourages much needed debate. 

Shops shut in city centre protest. 

The news from Hereford is depressingly familiar as the supermarket colonisation of market towns via the convenient out/edge-of-town sites offered by livestock markets continues. But the It’s Our City campaign has presented over 10,000 signatures to the council petitioning against the Hereford livestock market development and initiated bold initiatives to demonstrate opposition in the form of  early shop closing by independents.

There is a growing swell of opinion everywhere that the lack of choice, quality, variety, identity, vibrancy caused to towns by supermarket development is not what the majority of people want. And as the realisation dawns that the era of Peak Oil is passed, Climate Change is a reality, financial systems are crucially flawed, and that a country with a government that is borrowing about £165 Billion this year alone to keep us afloat and that imports more than it exports because it doesn’t make anything anymore is a country that is basically buggered for a very long time to come – more and more people know that more supermarkets and retail developments are no longer a viable option. They are yesterdays answers to challenges we are only just aware of, but are coasting into in the desperate hope that they will also answer the needs of a very different and difficult near future.

Here in Oswestry the mood has changed greatly over the last 18 months. Traders, shoppers, visitors are all, increasingly, of the opinion that Oswestry does not need another supermarket.

The “need” argument is spurious. The actual need is for supermarkets to keep expanding to satisfy shareholder support and for developers to stay in business. As long as those needs are met, then the culture, identity, viability of town centres continue to be secondary, with all the social and economic results that we see around us – the erosion of community.