Yesterday I went on another field trip - this time to Coalville. As the name implies, coalville was built on coal-mining. It’s surrounded by quarries to the south, although many of the mines were closed down by Thatcher and it’s no longer a major industry. The evidence of the pits is still there, and the mining heritage still defines the town’s identity. Now the mines have been replaced by distribution centres and vast logistics operations. As we were approaching the town the coach took us past the warehouses. Here’s the DHL warehouse entrance. For a town which was built from scratch, it’s remarkably fragmented, there’s just a loose grouping of settlements, and no single defined centre. Administratively it’s the seat of the district council, but it has no town council of its own; instead the town is torn between several parish councils. We went through Hugglescote on the way in. Here’s the mosaic artist Lynda Baugh talking about the founding myth of Hugglescote.
Coalville sits on the Leicester-Burton railway line, but there’s no train station. The old station building was turned first into a pub, then into a childcare centre. Trains just pass through the town without stopping. Nobody seemed too bothered about that and it puzzles me. The station building is there, the infrastructure is there, the tracks go right by the Amazon warehouse too. It’s easy to see why the area makes sense for logistics, it’s cheap land, roughly in the centre of the country, near East Midlands International Airport, within easy reach of the A42 and the M1 motorway. But it’s limited to road freight only, just trucks. There are the remains of old tracks in the town. These would have branched off to Snibston colliery (now a golf course). Nearby the current railway is Coalville market. There is a plan to shut it down and relocate the merchants to a new outdoor market in Marlborough square.
The market inspires different opinions. The business manager believes it to be unprofitable and has difficulty filling stall spaces, meanwhile the community groups want it opened up as a general space for community use. The building was also purpose-built, and it’s chilly inside. Some people said this was a deliberate design decision to keep the vegetables fresh, and others were put off by this cold, unpleasant building, they thought it was just badly insulated. We also visited the indoor market in Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Here is a stall selling coffee beans. The smell of the beans was strong, sweet coffee aroma wafted around the market. It’s an obvious sales tactic, but it’s also something unique to the experience of a small market. Modern supermarkets are sanitised, they try their hardest not to smell of anything except mild disinfectant. There was a stall selling perfume, and they had this delicately balanced mound of boxes and bottles. Georgia wondered whether what would happen if you needed a bottle from the bottom, like playing a very risky game of jenga.
Nearby there were some super creepy wig mannequins. Overall, the market seemed non-gentrified (un-gentrified?). The furniture area at the back used to be a dance hall. I spoke to the guy on the phone repair shop near me repair stall. He said he’d been there three months, and he was getting by - "we pay the rent." He mentioned that he’d studied computing at university. I found that really curious - if you’ve got a computing degree, you’d definitely earn more as a junior software engineer than as a phone repair guy. I told Georgia, who suggested it might be down to labour market distortions. Also in Ashby we went past this public artwork, related the National Forest. The poles are like trees. Some students described the sculpture as looking like ‘bent lampposts.’ The art is also controversial as it was put up without much involvement from the local community, it cost £50,000 and some people felt that money could have been better spent on other things.
visit south shop
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