How an empty supermarket in Otley has become the bellwether of the challenges Britain’s towns face - David Behrens
The Jubilee Clock in Otley’s market square is a bellwether right now for towns across Britain. It has stood since 1887 as a monument to 50 years of Victorian England but it’s no longer the clock face you notice as you walk past. It’s the empty supermarket next door.
Fultons used to be a cheap and cheerful purveyor of frozen peas and Holland’s pies – I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt about its cheerfulness; I never went inside – but Poundland took it over and closed it down. It has been empty for three years and the crude murals on the windows don’t hide the dereliction.
It wouldn’t have mattered so much if it was tucked away on a side street, but Fultons is one of the biggest and most visible sites in the town centre. It’s too big for a charity shop or one of those pop-up emporia that sell fireworks and Christmas cards at this time of year – so what’s to become of it?
Otley today is at a crossroads. Geographically it always was: before they built the bypass in the 1980s the roads from Leeds to Ilkley and Bradford to Harrogate ran right through it. The junction near the Jubilee Clock was where they met.
The modern-day crossroads is symbolic rather than physical. Otley is still a thriving and relatively prosperous place – it has a Waitrose, for goodness sake – but it is at a tipping point. It can adapt to the changing demands of post-lockdown Britain or it can sink gradually into desolation and decrepitude, like so many other towns in the West Riding and beyond.
Revisiting it the other weekend after a few years away I was struck by several fashionable new eateries but also by the number of shops that had fallen vacant or been surrendered to low-value retailers.
This is a point not lost on the local business community, whose members have rallied around a campaign to do something about the state of Fultons. They and the local MP, Katie White, want councillors to use new powers given them under Labour’s naffly-named Pride in Place programme to seize the building through compulsory purchase and turn it into something useful.
Good luck to them if they can manage it, but it’s not something they should have to campaign for.
There is an obvious use for buildings like this, too big and expensive to convert and without overwhelming historic significance, and that is to replace them with desirable homes. Housebuilding, preferably not at the expense of swathes of countryside, is after all another central plank of what’s left of Labour’s manifesto.
Residential developments are the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of 21st century town centres. The old distinctions between places you work, places you go to shop and places you live have morphed into one for an emerging generation to whom bedroom and office are one and the same. That’s not necessarily a threat to established centres of commerce; it’s an opportunity.
A town like Otley comes with infrastructure already laid on: good schools, shops and pubs on the doorstep, buses to Leeds and those endless walks on the Chevin, just up the hill. What more could a new homeowner want? And for those already there, new residents would bring cash to spend on local goods and services. It’s a money-go-round that benefits everyone.
There are compromises, it’s true. You can’t easily park in the town centre – but the same goes for many newly-gentrified parts of London, where a pied-a-terre the size of Fultons’ fish counter costs more than a whole row of Yorkshire terraces.
It’s not just me who thinks new houses should be built on sites other than green fields where the locals are hostile, or derelict plots that developers don’t want. Just last month the Resolution Foundation, one of the more transparent of the think-tanks that try to influence politicians, said that if ambitious targets for new homes were to be met, they would have to be built in the “right” parts of England.
It didn’t mention Otley specifically; it concerned itself with cities, not market towns. It didn’t mention Bradford, either, even though it has more empty shops than almost anywhere but also less potential for growth, apparently.
But in between, in communities approaching that tipping point between rehabilitation and regression, lie hundreds of small opportunities to build homes people will love. That should be the first recourse of their planning departments, and the prospect of seizing redundant premises opens the door for them.
The lease on the Fultons building runs out next week so it represents the first big test for this supposedly flagship policy. I do hope someone will seize the moment.