Charlotte Brontë spent an unhappy few months in 1839 on the outskirts of Skipton in North Yorkshire, as governess to the unruly children of John Sidgwick, a wealthy cotton mill owner in the town.
Charlotte wrote to her sister Emily that she found the countryside, which is close by the Yorkshire Dales, to be “divine”. But the scenery did not make up for the misbehaviour of the Sidgwick children, whom she found to be “riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs”. Charlotte did not keep her job long, but she would have seen Skipton as it entered its Victorian heyday, with the chimneys of mills sprouting everywhere, a busy canal linking the town to Liverpool and Leeds, and a big sheep and cattle market in the town centre.
Nearly two hundred years after Charlotte was in Skipton, the mills are gone, demolished or converted to other uses, with only one chimney still standing. But the market in the broad high street in the town centre still takes place four days a week, though the cattle and sheep part has moved to a big facility on the edge of town, while the barges on the canal cater for tourists instead of transporting raw cotton, coal and stone from the quarries. As for everyday life, a survey by the property website Rightmove found Skipton to be “the happiest place” to live in the UK, though as Charlotte Brontë knew all too well, happiness is very much a matter of personal circumstance.
Skipton, which has a population of 15,500, shares many of the advantages and failings of the 1,000 towns in Britain with populations under 60,000, such as Lewes in East Sussex or Canterbury in Kent. They are often attractive places in which to live, but they all struggle against their high streets being hollowed out and reduced to retail deserts as shoppers abandon them for out-of-town supermarkets and online shopping. High rents and business rates squeeze out independent businesses, while the branches of famous high-street stores and banks close, replaced by a depressing mix of estate agents, charity shops, vape shops and nail bars, interspersed with boarded-up shop fronts. Soaring house prices and rents force out the children of local residents who can no longer afford to buy a place to live near their parents.
More is at stake here than commercial success or failure, because people see their local high street as the geographic and social heart of their community, which, once lost, leads to the disintegration of their communal identity. An Ipsos poll last year found that 79 per cent of the public list high-street decline as one of their two most important concerns, only just behind rising prices (84 per cent). Some 54 per cent visit their local high street or shopping area once a week, but they complain of too many vape, barber and charity shops, and a lack of independent stores offering a wide variety of goods. For many, the poor state of their local high street is visible and depressing evidence of national decline.
Some towns are fighting back more successfully than others, suggesting that high-street decline is not inevitable. Skipton has more going for it than many other towns in terms of local wealth and employment, but I got the impression during a visit that it has taken better advantage of its opportunities than elsewhere.
“There is a greater sense of communal solidarity here which makes it easier to organise things than in other towns,” says Skipton’s mayor, Winston Feather, comparing it to Dover and Canterbury where he once lived. Born in North Yorkshire, a former master mariner in the merchant navy, and later a shopkeeper, he came back to Yorkshire in 2017 and has just been re-elected mayor of Skipton. Looking with pride down the town’s handsome high street, crowned at the top with Holy Trinity Church and Skipton Castle, he says that “the market in the high street is the biggest draw for visitors”, together with the many independent shops and restaurants, often tucked into narrow lanes off the high street where rents are lower.
Market traders and shopkeepers are under intense competitive pressure from supermarkets, online shopping and former customers working from home. But “when one shop closes another opens,” says Sarah Howsen, the manager of the local Business Improvement District (BID), with shop vacancy only five per cent. She cautions that this year “bars and restaurants are doing better than retailers who are really struggling with people worried about spending money”.
The market gives a sense of cheerful human activity to the town centre even on the rainy Monday when I was there. The bad weather may have put the market traders in a jaundiced mood as they described the difficulties they face. Mohammed Saghir, who has been selling clothing in Skipton market for 40 years, told me that “there has been a huge decline in the market because of online shopping, but I still have my regular customers.” He also owns a clothes shop called Riviera Boutique and complains angrily about business rates, as did every other retailer I spoke to, saying that he was paying the Government “for providing free air”.
He lamented that independent shopkeepers “lack clout nationally because we are scattered and don’t have a single voice”. Nearby, surrounded by attractive teak garden furniture, Robert Smith explained that it was made in Indonesia “because English firms don’t make furniture like this any more.” He said “people are scared to spend money” because the Labour Government had raised taxes and the price of diesel. Another market trader, Mark Howard, said “supermarkets are selling cheap clothes that once you could only buy in markets”. Unsurprisingly, the children of market traders seldom want to enter the same business. Yet, for all these complaints and tribulations, there are still 45 regular and 30 irregular traders in Skipton Market.
Like many English towns, Skipton grew up around its market, granted a royal charter by King John in 1204 to hold one weekly in its high street, trading in sheep and wool. The name Skipton comes from the Anglo-Saxon for “sheep town”, though livestock trading has moved to the Skipton Auction Mart located on the outskirts of town. Sheep still graze in great numbers on the soaring green hills of the Dales. Many local events, like the annual Sheep Day, revolve around sheep and wool. Skipton has a well preserved medieval castle, but the town today is very much the creation of the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries when cotton mills were going up everywhere and there were good connections by canal and railway to the rest of the country.
As elsewhere in Britain, the town has never quite recovered from deindustrialisation. Though it looks prosperous enough, I was struck by signs of past municipal wealth compared to the current dire absence of resources. For instance, Skipton Town Hall is a splendid-looking Victorian building at the top of the high street, but the town council has been forced to rehouse away from its offices and council chamber after a leak in the roof led to the collapse of a ceiling and rendered part of the building unsafe. This occurred in 2023, but North Yorkshire Council, which owns the Grade II listed building, has been unable to find the money to make the necessary repairs.
Where cash is available for redevelopment, the benefits are self-evident, as with the small but award-winning museum, housed in that part of the town hall which is still useable. Remodelled at a cost of £5m, it contains, among other objects, a Shakespeare First Folio, one of only four on public display in Britain; a 4,000-year-old gold collar found in a local stream; and the fascinating diary of a 19th-century cotton weaver, Richard Ryley, who recorded his struggle to survive chronic illness and malnutrition – Skipton’s Victorian wealth benefited only a portion of its inhabitants.
Skipton has advantages over other towns thanks to its history and location – but it has made the most of them. Lauding its efforts, Sir Julian Smith, the Conservative MP for Skipton and Ripon since 2010, describes its high street as “a beacon for other towns, with its vibrant market, wide range of shops and frequent events attracting visitors.” He points to other advantages such as the presence of the Skipton Building Society, the fourth largest building society in the country. With some 2,000 employees, most living outside the town, its big headquarters building is close to Skipton Castle. Good rail connections to Leeds and Bradford make it feasible to commute to both cities.
Skipton is a tourist town, billed as “the gateway to the Dales’” which are visited by huge numbers attracted to its high green hills, up and down which snake ancient stone walls penning in grazing sheep, and its deep valleys with gushing streams. The bucolic scenery has long been used by television companies whose programmes have promoted the Dales as an idyllic if vanishing fragment of rural life in England. When I drove through Grassington, nine miles from Skipton and the fictional town of Darrowby in All Creatures Great and Small, the street was filled with camera crews and actors suitably dressed in early 20th-century clothes standing beside a mock vintage petrol pump outside a pub.
What remains of traditional market-town Britain is under continuing threat. “It is heartbreaking,” says Sir Julian, “to see businesses which have just recovered from the impact of Covid being hammered by rising prices and business rates. I was talking to the owner of a pub in the area which has a £2m turnover, but they are not sure they can make a profit and survive.”
Many negative developments are the same in Skipton as in the rest of the country. Local bank branches used to be a prominent feature of every high street, says Sarah Howsen of BID, recalling that there used to be “five bank branches in Skipton just five years ago, but now there is only one and one cash machine aside from the supermarkets.”
A further nationwide problem is that young people can no longer afford to buy a place to live.
In Skipton, the average house price is £280,000 according to Howsen, who says that many prefer to live in nearby Lancashire where the average house price in, for example, the small town of Earby, seven miles away, is £160,000. But those who buy or rent more cheaply in Lancashire or West Yorkshire then have to cope with the grossly inadequate rural bus service, which may make it impossible to get to work in Skipton without a car. This in turn makes people living in distant villages vulnerable to fuel prices rises brought about by the closure of the Strait of the Hormuz.
No magic ingredient exists for saving the British high street. All are under multiple pressures, especially the cost of renting or leasing shops from anonymous absentee property companies. Deindustrialisation took away good jobs everywhere, but even where this did not happen, the high streets are often empty. For instance, Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, with a population of 55,500, has a nuclear submarine construction yard employing 14,000 people on high wages, yet its high street is as desolate as any I have seen. Dover in Kent has its great port and the finest medieval castle in England, but the huge number of passengers on the visiting cruise liners somehow bypass this historic but moribund town.
As a former resident of Dover and Canterbury and current mayor of Skipton, Feather is something of an authority on what makes towns flourish or founder. He sees civil activism and municipal competence as essential. He cites Canterbury, where he once owned a shop, as an example of how, decades ago, an ill-run council, often under the control of a self-interested coterie, failed to take advantage of local opportunities. His shop was near Westgate Towers, among the most magnificent medieval gateways in Europe, but it was viewed by the then councillors “as an obstacle to traffic rather than a national treasure which would attract visitors”. The police demanded notification long in advance before giving grudging assent for events and festivals to go ahead.
The quality of local government in Britain varies markedly, but even where it is active and efficient, councils are starved of decision-making powers and financial resources by an overcentralised government. Devolution is essential because problems – and solutions – vary markedly from place to place.
The decline of the high street might appear to be mundane and parochial compared to other issue, but for many Britons, it is the much-resented symbol of the failure of the British state.
Read the rest of Patrick’s essays below:
In a horrible irony, Britain is starting to mirror Northern Ireland – and destabilising bothLewes looks like an idyll. Yet it represents so much that is wrong with the UKThe nuclear town rising from the ashes of austerity
From 2024:‘It is like being back in Victorian times’ – low pay, uncertain hours and a workforce in revoltIn Salford, sleek skyscrapers tell the story of a toxic legacyWordsworth would despair at Tory neglect of the River WyeIn the first Red Wall seat to turn Tory, people no longer believe in BrexitDover has been abandoned by the Tories – now residents will have their revengeCanterbury is a symbol of declining England – and will turn on the Tories
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