The battle to save one man’s pick ’n’ mix stall: ‘A council can’t dictate what people buy’
If you wanted to bottle the scent of childhood, your first port of call would surely be the puff of sugar that hits you square in the face when you uncrumple a paper bag filled with boiled sweets. It’s that hit of buttery toffee that takes you back (or sharp sherbet, or aniseed, or cola, depending on your preference).
For the past 20 years, if you were to stroll through the market town of Saxmundham in Suffolk on a Wednesday morning, you could treat yourself to a dose of nostalgia. Kev’s Pick ’n’ Mix has long provided people here with little luxuries to perk up their day – all you had to do was fish a pound from your purse and you could snaffle a fistful of knobbly blue spogs into your pocket to take home. “One customer has £5 of toffees off me every week,” says Kevin Hilliard. “Customers like that keep me going. That’s why I’ve been loyal to the place.”
From next month, if you want a few rhubarb and custards in Saxmundham, you’ll have to go elsewhere. At the end of March, Hilliard will be forced to pack up and find a new spot to sell his old fashioned sweets. The council has, rather unceremoniously, served him his notice. Why? Because a trestle table laden with boxes of humbugs just doesn’t fit with their vision for a smart little farmer’s market.
Hilliard has lived in Suffolk all his life. He has four daughters and seven grandchildren. At 68, he was looking forward to slowing down after spending over 20 years on a market stall and more still as a lorry driver. He was hoping to keep going for a couple further summers before handing the business over to his youngest daughter. Now, he has found himself the victim of a rebranding.
The council wants to give a boost to its Wednesday market, which has a lower footfall compared to its Saturday one. They’re renaming it “Fresh Fare at Fromus Square” and introducing a greater focus on healthy produce. Out goes the sweet stall, then, and with it a friendly face who many look forward to visiting every week.
“I think it’s wrong,” says Michael Light, 63, a local resident who comes by every week on his dog walk to see about a bag of liquorice whirls and another of torpedoes. “I don’t believe a council – whether it be this council or another one – can dictate what people can and can’t buy.
“Let people make their own choice. At the end of the day, you can’t buy sweets because it’s not healthy or fresh but you can buy cakes?” The stall next to Hilliard’s, he points out, sells beautiful looking homemade cakes. More to the point, he says, “you can go into Tesco and get pick ’n’ mix”. Understandably, he would rather give the money for his weekly treat to Hilliard than to Tesco.
Hilliard was served notice two weeks ago. He was manning the stall after a week off (he was on grandpa duty, picking up his brand new grandson from hospital) when a man from the council handed him a letter. “He gave me a letter first off about what they’re planning to do with the market and when that was all decided. Then after I’d read that one he gave me the other one which was my termination letter.”
The letter informed Hilliard he would have to vacate his spot by March 27. “A month, that was,” he says. He isn’t prone to hyperbole but admits he was “a bit shocked” when he opened the letter. “It just said we don’t think we can support a pick ’n’ mix stall on the market anymore with the way we want to take the market forward, and you’ve got a month to terminate your pitch.”
He didn’t think it worth fighting the council’s decision, though he did feel it was a shoddy way to treat a longstanding stall holder. “I’ve been loyal to this for over 20 years. All through Covid. I was trying to deliver to my regular customers on Facebook.”
His youngest daughter, Michaela, felt differently. An online petition she created has more than 1,000 signatures; people in Saxmundham and further afield rushed to support a man who has been a regular fixture in their lives for two decades.
On a Wednesday morning, two weeks before what is set to be Hilliard’s final day on the square, a steady flow of people are pottering around the stalls. “Do you have the petition to sign?” asks Eva Halliday, a regular customer who brings her nine-year-old grandson, Elliott, to buy sweets when he comes to stay. “It’s just horrible. My grandchildren if they come here they can spend £1. If they go to the shop they have to spend £5, which is absolutely wrong.”
She is incredulous at the idea of sweets being too unhealthy for a food market. Even her nine-year-old grandson knows it’s a case of everything in moderation. “It’s his treat once every couple of months when he comes for his holiday. It’s a big thing for him, coming here. He buys sweets and next he goes to that stall and buys fruit. He’s nine. He knows he can’t buy as much as he wants. He doesn’t eat everything at once. He knows he can have five sweets a day, that’s it.”
Denise Hallant feels similarly. “It’s silly,” she says, summing up in two words the whole sorry affair. “You’ve got a choice, haven’t you, whether you want sweets or not.”
Sharon Smith, a council clerk, said the response to Hilliard’s story had been “genuinely unexpected”. “We sincerely wish that everyone who has engaged with this debate online would come out and regularly support their local market. Despite the success and support we have experienced for the monthly Saturday markets, this has not carried over to Wednesdays, which are a source of regular complaints, use valuable council resources and are not well supported by the public.
“We firmly believe we must act now to save our weekly market and that a focus on fresh produce will draw in more weekday shoppers.”
For a number of years, she said, stall fees have been waived to help traders, but footfall has been low for some time. That may be the case, but it’s hard to see how replacing one stall is going to change that.
Today, the market, in a small square in front of Waitrose, has just three stalls other than Hilliard’s. One sells quiches and cakes, one sells fruit and veg, another fish. On a Saturday, the market is bigger; for the Wednesday stallholders it’s really just about ticking along, providing locals with a few essentials and, crucially, an alternative to the supermarket. It’s easy to see why, in the midst of a rebrand, Kev’s Pick ’n’ Mix has been deemed no longer fashionable.
The coffee shop on the square, with its £3 cortados and £4.50 kombucha, and the homeware store with its £25 candles are of a different breed. They wouldn’t look out of place in east London (and indeed any city escapees in Saxmundham must be thrilled by these newer additions) – the other three stalls with their fresh produce make sense in this foodie enclave. Hilliard’s stall, with its functional plastic boxes and green and white striped tent is a simpler, less trendy affair. But it does the job. You just wonder if he would be turfed out if his sweets were displayed in retro glass jars or his stock featured a nice artisan fudge.
“You know what, years ago I went to a firm to see about having tubs [made],” says Hilliard.
“This was 10, 15 years ago and that was going to cost me £1,500. You can go out and buy them in the shops and just one of them costs about £72. You just can’t do it.”
He is trepidatious about starting afresh somewhere new. “When you come onto a market you’ve got to start down there and build your trade up. It’s a case of ‘ooh, new stall there’. And then another week they’ll walk past and have another gander. In the third week they might come in and have a gander round. And then the fourth week they might buy something.
“You know what shopping habits are like. It’s like everything else, it’s the customer’s choice.”
Choosing sweets is a private affair, according to Hilliard, who lets people take a bag and pick their own quietly. “They’re not keen on stating exactly what [they’re getting],” he tells me, as I discover when I ask one regular customer what she has plumped for. “Toffees, if you must know,” she says, before dashing off back to her day. She might like to buy double next week. Unless the council changes its mind, she doesn’t have long to stock up.
