Leeds Market Madness

“I don’t know what I’ll do if the market closes or the shops get more expensive. I rely on it for cheap food, clothes and household goods. It’s just another example of the poorer people being pushed out of the city centre, isn’t it.”

Thirty-two market stall holders are refusing to pay rent rises averaging 80% ordered by Leeds City Council business consultants. These increases of £2,000 to £4,000 a month, if successful, mean that market stalls will be forced to close or to put up their prices. The rises have left market traders and shoppers bewildered – is the aim of the Council to close the market down and replace it with designer boutiques?

Lifeline

Since 1882 Kirkgate Market has been essential to thousands of people in Leeds who struggle to live on a low income. The market not only provides cheap necessities like food, clothes and household items – it’s also a vital and vibrant meeting place for people who don’t want to or can’t afford to drink coffee in corporate mega-monsters like Starbucks. As more and more people are hit by job losses, low wages and debt crises – the logical conclusion of the current economic system – places like Kirkgate Market are a lifeline.

The recent rise in rent for market stalls fits in perfectly with the trend for s-wanky shops and yuppie flats, a trend known all over the world as ‘gentrification’. Leeds can’t move for prestige developments and, excluding London, it is officially the UK’s most divided city in terms of rich and poor. Clarence Docks, the planned Grand Theatre complex, a multi-million pound development threatening the Chinatown area of Eastgate and the £10m yuppie flat complex being built on Concord Street right next to one of the most deprived areas of central Leeds – Little London – are just a few of them. Will Kirkgate Market be added to the list?

Collateral Damage

Of course, all this development can’t happen without casualties. While developers are busy arranging collateral on new business enterprises, the Council is turning a blind eye to the collateral damage which is part and parcel of gentrification – a decrease in social provision and economic security for those at the lower end of the economic scale. Those living in Little London, for example, are being threatened with eviction under a Public-Private Finance Initiative (PPFI) scheme – a project being fought by the Little London Tenants and Residents Association. Instead of improving council flats so that the Council’s desire to ‘clean up’ the city centre can be a reality for everyone – both rich and poor – the occupants of two hundred Little London flats can expect to be evicted and moved to the outskirts of the City in the next couple of years so that private companies can do up the flats and rent them out to professionals at market prices.

The poor have always been pushed around. Centuries ago we were pushed off our common land by the Enclosure Act and forced to work the land not for the benefit of ourselves, our families and communities but for thieving landowners, then the Industrial Revolution forced us into cities to work long hours in awful conditions for the profit of unscrupulous factory owners, and now after a century of urban living the rich have decided they want to occupy both the country and the cities and there is a concerted drive to force anyone without money out of the city centre and into ever more isolated and run-down areas of the city.

Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay!

We reckon people have more power than they sometimes think - through assertive collective action. Already a courageous group of thirty two stall holders in Kirkgate Market are sticking together to fight rent increases. As users and supporters of Leeds market, we can find ways to stop our market being destroyed, whether it’s occupying council offices, writing letters or supporting rebel market traders as they fight a council on the make.