How food and farming helped shape a Somerset commuter town's identity [WFJ #91]

This small town is home to one of the county’s biggest farmers’ markets

If you haven’t come across Nailsea, you’ve probably heard of what’s around it – there’s Portishead and Clevedon to the north, Weston-super-Mare to the south west, the Mendips to the south, and Bristol to the east. 

Being so close to Bristol, but usually considerably cheaper than living in it, is telling. That said, to brazenly file Nailsea into the ‘commuter town’ category, as it has been so many times before, would in some ways be unfair. To do so carries with it fairly uninspiring notions, the kind of which would distract from the best things the town has going for it – namely, its personality and its palpable spirit. 

This is best recognised at its monthly farmers’ market, which has become a sort of living confluence of the town’s communities. It’s where the walking football team might appear one month, and the pantomime dame – in full costume – the next. Same goes for other local groups like the ukulele club or men’s shed, making an appearance alongside lardy cake, sustainably-managed venison, and ‘possibly the best curried pies in the world’. 

The market, which the council started up 15 years ago with close support from Somerset Farmers Markets – a not-for-profit that runs a further six markets across the county – has more recently come under the control of Somerset Farmers Markets (SFM) outright. “When [the town council’s] market coordinator resigned,” says SFM’s Louise Hall, who now administers Nailsea’s market along with husband Markus Mohn, “we probably were the obvious choice.”

Towards the end of 2020 came the first Nailsea market officially under the SFM banner. “We had quite an ambitious plan to make it a big market,” Louise says. “And whereas the council had run a farmer's market, a craft market and a community market, my brief was to integrate the craft traders alongside the food. But I didn't want to have a separate community market – what I said is that I would have two or three community stalls on the rota, so there was still a lot of community involvement.”

In what was, as Louise describes, “the best launch SFM has ever had”, the market consisted of 40 stalls, and at the centre of it, 30 food and drink producers, either local (as SFM’s criteria prefers) to Nailsea or of high enough quality to recruit from further afield. The Great Cake Company, which makes gluten-free sweet treats (its hero item, perhaps, is its Great Taste award-winning millionaires shortbread) is one of the latter, and has been trading with SFM in Nailsea since the market’s first outing. “The population of Nailsea really seem to like and value the farmers’ markets,” says The Great Cake Company’s co-owner Chris Webster. “And that's reflected by the council who support us as well.”

Often, as was the case in Nailsea pre-November 2020, Somerset’s councils – sometimes those of its towns, but usually of the whole county – will run a local market themselves, which as other Somerset towns might attest, can result in a fairly banal exercise of quantity over quality. In contrast, the word ‘curation’ is often used among those at SFM, who over their 24-year history have amassed a pool of producers both Somerset-based and, as per SFM’s criteria, generally following higher social, animal welfare, or environmental standards. Something some, but evidently not many, councils value enough. “From the funding [Nailsea] council give us,” Louise says, “they pay for the market licence. It allows us to advertise the market, pay for musicians to come in, and pay the coordinator’s salary.” 

Adding to that, it allows for organising the bureaucratic headache and relatively costly endeavour that is a monthly road closure. Where, pre-SFM management, the market took place in the Crown Glass shopping centre, consternation from shops – who had market traders selling on their doorsteps – meant that the market had to move. And so it was over to the High Street instead. “The High Street had been struggling,” Louise says, adding that its retailers “actually wanted us there.” 

For one Saturday a month at least, shops won’t be as worried about local footfall. To the extent that, though technically Nailsea exists on Bristol’s commuter belt, the market is helping the town be a draw in of itself. “If you live on the Nailsea side of Bristol, it’s much easier to shop in Nailsea than it is going into the centre of Bristol to have the equivalent experience,” Louise says. A bold claim perhaps, though as pastry chef Paul Davies, who’s on the market’s roster, tells the WFJ, “[the market’s] got a really great catchment. There’s nothing like it in the area, not even in that side of Bristol.”

It’s difficult to gauge just how much of an effect it’s had but, in her 18 years as a market coordinator, Louise rarely comes across a more collectively-minded council. On market day, for instance, councillors set up with a gazebo outside their community venue on the High Street, where local citizens are invited to field comments and concerns. “The most interesting thing for me was making it a priority, and knowing that the council wanted it to be a priority, to showcase the kind of things in the community that make Nailsea a really great place to live,” says Louise.

In spite of that, Louise asserts that the main aim has always been to keep it “very much a farmer-led market” of local and small-scale producers. Without those intentions, it’s likely there wouldn’t be much more to offer than food and drink the local branches of Iceland, Waitrose, or Tescos provide. By all means, coming up with an alternative hasn’t been completely plain sailing – a new bricks-and-mortar fishmonger’s in town, for instance, is thought to have made the role of the market’s fish seller close to redundant, thus raising the question of who gets to serve the town’s demands. Either way, now celebrating its third anniversary in its current guise, Nailsea is proving that farmers’ markets can be more than the sum of their parts – rather, a representation of a town’s personality, reflected back on itself. 

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Disclaimer: Since summer 2022, the author of this piece has been in a management role with SFM farmers’ markets in Frome. Still, and given the limited information available at the time, this story is not intended to be biassed towards any particular person, people, or organisation.

Further reading:

The fate of Frome farmers' market [WFJ #26]

To feast on a (Somerset) farm [WFJ #85]