Seeing the Back of the Shops

It's not all that much better around the other side just now either.

Had a walk around the town earlier, past the charity shops, the take-aways, the quiet and closed pubs, the bookies, the hairdressers and tanning salons, the pound shops, the tick shops, the charity shops and, for some reason, multiple opticians. The place wasn't busy, dead even (emphasised by the chap closing up the shop that sells cemetery headstones in the High Street). There are some decent shops in amongst that lot, hopefully ticking along nicely and encouraging others, but there's a lot of empty places and 'to let' signs. I suppose it's like every other small town in the country just now.

This place used to be the 'Big Shop' in the town; the Co-op with it's grocery store, clothing, furniture, electrical & white goods and toy shops over a number of buildings. But that's gone and mostly flattened now. What's left, in the picture here, is to become another one of the production line of characterless national pub chain branches sometime soon, but something seems to be dragging its heels over moving that forward.

Even the train station and new line that brought us back into the rail network five years ago, at a cost of £85 million, seems to take more people out of the town than it brings into it, and it's been announced this week that even though it's only been operating that relatively short time it's going to need at another £17 million spent on it to fix some subsidence problems.

I'm sure the rain that was starting to fall and everything being bathed in dreich didn't help today, but jeez the town looks pretty sorry for itself just now.