Readers Letter . . . .
December 2nd, 2009
Carmarthen – a lesson for Newcastle Emlyn?
Been to Carmarthen recently? I spent a few hours traipsing around the shops there last Friday doing a bit of Christmas shopping, and it was pretty depressing. Not long ago, King Street was a lively, interesting place full of small shops, but every time I go back there I notice that a few more have gone.
The Myrddin Bakery has closed, the old department store which until recently was selling bargain furniture is now just a black gaping hole. What was a nice shopping street is now becoming a rat-run that you just want to get through as quickly as possible.
There are a few nice little shops left, of course, but speak to the shopkeepers, and you will hear that their business is being dragged down by the air of decay which is taking over.
Carry on through Nott Square and head down the hill, and you will see that the store which took over from Woolies is having a closing down sale. Head towards Marks and Spencer’s, and you will see more and more mobile phone shops.
The centre of Carmarthen is shifting away from the old historic streets with their picturesque buildings and small, locally owned businesses towards a concrete, steel and glass jungle full of all the big name stores you will find in any other town in Britain, and of course they will soon be joined by Debenham’s.
Carmarthen was not blitzed by the Luftwaffe; it was destroyed by Carmarthenshire County Council instead, and it seems they will not rest until they have succeeded in turning Carmarthen into a carbon copy of Croydon or Luton.
If you read the Council’s report on the Cawdor supermarket application in Newcastle Emlyn, you will see that they bang on and on about something called the “sequential test”. This policy means that they are supposed to give preference to retail developments in historic town centres. If you took the Council at its word, you would think that this policy was holy writ, but when you think about any of the larger towns in Carmarthenshire, you are left wondering when the Council has ever applied it. Are Tescos, Morrisons or Aldi within walking distance of the town centre in Carmarthen? Has anyone ever managed to walk from the centre of town to Morrisons and lived to tell the tale? What about Llanelli?
If small, local businesses didn’t have enough to cope with, the Council is now launching a new attack on them with a fatwa against “unauthorised” A-boards. Shops which put out an A-board advertising their products will have their boards confiscated and be given a bill for the cost of removal.
Who is behind this? Step forward our very own Councillor Haydn Jones, Carmarthenshire’s equivalent of environment minister, siding again with the big guns against local businesses. His main concern, he says, is the safety of pedestrians. Presumably that was not one of his main considerations when he sat on the planning committee which gave Tescos the go-ahead to build its new superstore.
Richard Vale
Tut tut Mr Vale! Once again a sideways swipe at market progress, coupled with an argument hinged on the all too unfortunate nationwide effects of one of the biggest economic recessions in history, and an obscure and bizarre reference to a war 70 years ago! Surely you can conjure up a more constructive criticism than that?
On a similar note, I parked in the Cawdor car park with a work colleague this week, and we both walked into NCE. Both of us commented on what an eyesore and a let down to the town this area has become. I would once again humbly suggest that what we should all be working towards is how this site can be developed, and that if it can only be done with the help of a large-scheme developer, be it supermarket or property, we should actively encourage that, and not constantly harp on about the negative points.
I don’t think the demise of the small shops in Carmarthen has much to do with the recession, but rather more to do with greed and wilful destruction of the oldest town in Wales. Think about Newcastle Emlyn for a moment and how all the shops are currently occupied, and then ask yourself why that might be. Very possibly because our town hasn’t yet outsourced its economy.
And I couldn’t agree with you more – the Cawdor site is an eyesore. Like most people, I would like to see an imaginative development which would benefit the town and its people rather than some Megabucks plc.
By the way, the Luftwaffe bombed Swansea and Cardiff along with a string of cities in England, events which may well be ‘bizarre and obscure’ to people like Katie Price, but surely not to the majority of people over the age of 16.
I’m glad that we can find something to agree on Richard. But unlike you I think the only way that we may get the Cawdor ‘eyesore’ site developed imaginatively is with the unfortunate concession to a ‘Megabucks plc’ funded project, as you so aptly put it; the Council surely won’t do anything. I just think that rather than kicking our heels against the inevitable, we need to embrace it by using their money to our own ends.
And incidentally as somebody who was raised in Coventry and whose late parents lived through the blitz of that city during World War Two, I am more than familiar with the sad results of that campaign. I still don’t see the validity to this side of your argument quite frankly.