It wasn’t that long ago that the market filled both sides of the street.
I remember it — and I don’t mean in a misty, “when I were a lad” sort of way. I mean recently enough that plenty of you reading this will remember it too. Stalls lined from one end to the other, both sides, so you had to weave a bit to get through. You’d go down for one thing and come back with four, and it’d take you twice as long as it should have because you kept stopping to talk to people.
Go down on a market day now and it’s hit-or-miss whether a stall turns up at all.
I want to talk about that. Not to have a moan, and definitely not to point the finger at anyone, because there’s nobody to point it at. But because I think it matters, and because I think it’s fixable — and those two things together are worth a conversation.
What thinning out actually looks like
It’s easy to talk about a market “declining” in the abstract. Here’s what it looks like in practice.
It’s the not knowing.
Not knowing how much will be there when you turn up. Not knowing whether it’s worth the walk down. That sounds like a minor irritation, and it would be, except for what it quietly does to a habit.
Here’s how it goes. You head down meaning to do a bit of your shopping there. It’s quieter than you hoped, so you get the rest at the supermarket on the way home. Next week you think about going, then think there might not be much on, so you don’t bother — you just go to the supermarket, because the supermarket is always the supermarket. And within a couple of months you’ve stopped thinking of the market as somewhere you shop at all.
You never decided that. Nobody sat down and chose it. It just drifted.
That’s not anybody’s fault, and I want to be really clear that it isn’t the traders’. Because it works both ways: no trader can justify committing to a pitch week in, week out if there aren’t enough people coming through on the days they’re there. And people don’t come reliably if they’re not sure what they’ll find. Nobody in that loop is behaving unreasonably. It’s just spinning the wrong way round.
The important thing about a loop like that is that it can spin the other way just as easily. It only needs a push — and the push has to come from our side, because traders can’t conjure customers out of nothing, but customers absolutely can conjure traders.
I wrote a bit about what I’d love to see more of in this town in my note about why we built Love Guisborough. This is the same argument from the other side of the counter: what a town can support is decided, in the end, by where the rest of us choose to spend.
Why a market matters more than the shopping
Here’s my honest case for why this is worth caring about, beyond nostalgia — because nostalgia on its own is a weak argument and I don’t want to lean on it.
A market is the most visible sign a town has of its own health. It’s the thing a visitor sees. Drive through a town on a market day and a busy market tells you, instantly and without a word, that this is somewhere people want to be. An empty pitch tells you the opposite, whether or not it’s actually true.
But more than that — a market is one of the last places left where you bump into people.
Think about how much of modern life is designed so you don’t have to talk to anybody. Self-checkouts. Deliveries left in the porch. Click and collect. It’s all very efficient and I use it like everyone else, but the cumulative effect is that you can go days without an unplanned conversation with someone you know.
A market is the opposite of that. You go for potatoes and you end up talking to three people you haven’t seen in a fortnight. That’s not a bonus feature, that’s the actual point. That’s the thing a town is made of.
We talk about Love Guisborough as a community hub rather than just a business directory, and this is exactly why. The businesses matter, but what really makes somewhere a town is the accidental stuff — the bumping into people, the familiar faces, the sense that you’re somewhere rather than anywhere. A market is that, condensed into a morning.
You don’t miss it until it’s gone. And by then it’s a much harder thing to build back than it was to keep.
“But it’s easier to just go to the supermarket”
I want to take that seriously rather than pretend it isn’t true, because it is true, and any argument that skips over it isn’t worth much.
The supermarket is open when you need it. It’s got everything under one roof. You can do the whole week in forty minutes with a trolley and a list. Nobody chooses a market over that because it’s more efficient, because it isn’t.
But I’d push back gently on two things.
The first is that “easier” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Easier than what, exactly? Most of us aren’t choosing between the market and the supermarket for the entire weekly shop — we’re choosing whether to add ten minutes to a Saturday we were already spending in town. That’s a much smaller ask than it feels like when you frame it as market versus supermarket. It doesn’t have to be either/or. Buy your fruit and veg at a stall and get the rest wherever you like. Nobody’s asking anyone to be a purist about it.
The second is that convenience has a price we don’t see on the receipt. Every one of those forty-minute trolley runs is a small vote about what kind of town we end up living in. Do that for long enough, collectively, and you get a town where the only place to buy anything is a big shed on the edge of it — and then the “easier” option becomes the only option, and you’ve lost the choice entirely.
I’m not trying to guilt anyone. I do the supermarket run too. I’m just saying that the market only needs a small slice of our custom to survive, and that slice is well within what most of us could give it without changing our lives at all.
Six hundred years is a long time to give up on
Here’s the bit that gets me.
Guisborough has been a market town for over 600 years.
Six hundred years. Through plagues, wars, the dissolution of the priory up the road, the ironstone boom and bust, the lot. People have been setting up stalls and selling things to their neighbours on this spot since before most of the country could read.
And the proof of it is still standing. The Market Cross sits at the head of the main street — an 18th-century sandstone monument, restored back in 2006 — and it marks the exact spot where the town’s markets and fairs have always been held. It’s still there. It still hosts public events. It’s a physical, in-the-ground reminder that this isn’t a nice idea somebody had recently. This is what this town is.
I find that genuinely moving, and also slightly terrifying, because things that have lasted 600 years can still end on our watch. They don’t have a protective forcefield. They last exactly as long as people keep turning up.
The practical bit: when to go
Right, enough of the philosophy. Here’s the useful information, and I’ve deliberately put it down here rather than at the top, because the “when” only matters if you’ve decided on the “why.”
Guisborough Market runs every Thursday and Saturday, 9am to 5pm, on the High Street. All year round.
And on every second Saturday of the month there’s also a Farmers Market — homemade preserves, pies, cheese, organic vegetables, handicrafts and more besides. If you’ve never made it to one of those, it’s worth planning a Saturday around.
There’s pay parking in the town centre, and the buses stop on the High Street, so getting there isn’t the obstacle.
What I’m actually asking
Three things. They’re all small, which is rather the point.
Go on a market day and buy something. Anything. It doesn’t have to be a big shop — a bit of fruit, a pie, something for tea. The traders who are showing up need people to show up back, and a stall that has a decent Thursday is a stall that comes again next Thursday. This is the entire mechanism. There isn’t a clever version of it.
Tell somebody. If you have a good time, say so. Mention it to a neighbour, put it on Facebook, tell the person at work who lives two streets over and never goes. A lot of people simply don’t have “the market” in their head as an option any more — not because they’ve rejected it, but because it’s slipped off the mental list. A nudge genuinely works.
And if you’re a trader — come and have a look at us. Whatever it is you sell. If you’ve ever wondered whether Guisborough could support a pitch, I’d say there’s a town here that would rather have more choice than less, and I’d love to talk to you about it. That’s not a sales pitch, and there’s nothing in it for me. Get in touch and let’s have a conversation.
This is a dip, not an ending
I want to finish on the honest note rather than the gloomy one, because I genuinely don’t think this is a tragedy in progress.
Markets go through cycles. Towns go through cycles. Six hundred years is more than enough time to have had a few quiet decades and come back from them, and I’d bet good money this town has had plenty. What’s happening now isn’t a death, it’s a dip — and dips reverse when enough people decide they should.
The frustrating and hopeful thing about this particular problem is that the solution isn’t complicated. Nobody needs to write a strategy or apply for funding or wait for permission. It just needs people to turn up and spend a few quid on a Thursday.
That’s it. That’s the whole plan.
I’ll be down there. Come and say hello — and if you spot the fish man, buy something off him from me.
Know a trader who should be at Guisborough Market, or running an event in town? Get in touch — we’d love to help get the word out.