Think for a minute what our town centres would be like if there were no large supermarkets nearby. A town centre with local butchers, greengrocers, bakers and fishmongers.

Money would stay in the community and benefit it. Instead we have food in overdone packaging, travelling miles from soulless warehouses to be sold under bright shiny lights.

You can now have your whole life nearly arranged by a supermarket, food, clothes, loans, mortgages, insurance, petrol and they will even sell you a second hand car to put the petrol in. Do people buy into supermarket loyalty because it is convenient? Do we lead such busy lives that we don’t have time to go to different shops?

I can remember when I was young that a van used to call in the village where I was brought up, it sold food and groceries from the back.

The small market town of Market Rasen in Lincolnshire where I worked over 30 years ago used to have on the market place a weekly auction of produce grown locally, and near Christmas there was an auction of freshly killed turkeys in the old corn exchange.

This makes you think of what the situation with local shops and markets is these days. Very few towns today have a greengrocer, or fishmongers, and independent bakers and butchers are thin on the ground. The Cambridgeshire town of March where I now live has a population of just over 20,000, and certainly looks the same as nearly every other small town you come across.

There is an out of town shopping centre with supermarket, DIY store, bed and carpet centre, general retailer, footwear superstore etc. Twenty years ago there were three greengrocers and five butchers. There are now no greengrocers and three butchers.

My local butchers which has been in existence for over 50 years has survived, but over 50 years a go when the town population would have been less, there were at least 16 local butchers, many with their own small slaughterhouse to the rear, selling locally sourced meats.

They would, in their busiest trading times several years ago, kill and sell six bullocks a month and four to five pigs and sheep a week.

Now those figures are about two bullocks a month, and four or five sheep and pigs in a month. Rules and regulations have of course finished off the practice of a butcher having his own slaughterhouse.

Meat is though still sourced from the nearest abattoir. To try and attract new customers, my local butchers now has a small fruit and vegetable stall outside the front of the shop, and this is starting to attract passing trade.

Local markets whilst still surviving and in some places thriving however some are still a shadow of their former selves.

For the full story see July's Smallholder