Closing W H Smith, moving the market, changes to Oldham. And stuff about fish’n’chips.

 W H Smith is planning to close stores in a number of places all over the country, including Oldham. So that’s another quite large hole in Oldham’s already rather moth-eaten shopping centre. Boots the Chemist keeps going, as does Primark, situated where C & A once thrived. Amazingly, to me anyway, there’s a perfume shop and a jewellers in the Spindles shopping centre - I wonder who patronises those shops - as well as various other shops such as the health food store Holland and Barrett  and Greggs. Otherwise there is a large number of cafes, charity shops and second hand shops, as in high streets all over the country. 

The disappearance of W H Smith, scheduled for May I think, means the disappearance of the town centre post office which has been inside W H Smith for a few years now. Just another inconvenience.

Oldham has long given the impression of trying to pull itself up by its boot straps and even now all sorts of work is going on to beautify or gentrify the centre. And the famous Tommyfield market is about to move house to a new venue close to the Spindles shopping centre. Everything changes! 

Looking for information on these changes I found this:

“The first market in Oldham was founded in 1788. In later years, open markets were held on land owned by Thomas Whittaker, near Albion Street. The land soon became known as Tommyfield, and Tommyfield Market is still a bustling centre of activity today.
The Market Hall was destroyed by a huge fire in 1974. The blaze could be seen for miles around and damaged surrounding premises. The hall was replaced by a temporary market building, before construction work began on the new hall in the early 1990s.”

And now that building is to be bulldozed.

Apparently Tommyfield market claims to be home to the first ever  fish and chip shop. I am told there is even a blue plaque to that effect but I’ve never seen it. I’ll have to hunt it out. Other contenders for opener of the first ever fish-and-chip shop are Joseph Malin, a Jewish immigrant who opened the first recorded fish-and-chip shop in Bow, London around 1860, and a Mr Lees who opened one in Mossley, a few miles from here, in 1863. Before that it seems there were places that sold fried fish (run by Portuguese Jewish immigrants according to a friend of mine) and Charles Dickens mentions a ‘fried fish warehouse’ in Oliver Twist, first published in 1838. I wonder how fried came to be combined with fried potatoes. 

There you go. Street food with history. 

And now we have MacDonalds, KFC, Subway and a whole range of places to buy food to eat on the street. We’ve come a long way from Wimpy Bars! There are even specialist do-nut shops. My grandchildren were very excited when Tim Horton’s, a Canadian establishment, opened a branch on Market Street in Manchester. The variety of do-nuts one can buy is astounding, especially for a food item I consider to be over-rated. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!