Holt: A town worth going into town for
Holt is the sort of place where you go in for a coffee and emerge two hours later carrying a greetings card, a small ceramic bowl and some olive oil that has apparently come from a very particular hillside. You didn't need any of them, but then necessity has never been the great engine of enjoyable shopping. The town sits a few miles inland from the North Norfolk coast, far enough from the sea to avoid most of the buckets and spades but close enough to benefit from people who own good coats and have strong opinions about where their bread comes from.
It is Georgian, handsome and remarkably well supplied with things that might be described as lovely. There are galleries, antiques, books, linen, lamps, cheese, expensive candles and clothes suggesting a life involving muddy dogs without any visible evidence of actual mud. In less capable hands this could all become unbearable, the retail equivalent of a kitchen painted entirely in Farrow & Ball, but Holt is saved by the fact that it still feels like a town where people actually do things. There is enough practicality mixed in with the good taste to prevent the whole place floating off towards Burnham Market.
The best of it isn't immediately obvious, either. Holt has perfectly respectable main streets, but much of the interesting stuff has escaped into the gaps between them. There are yards: Apple Yard, Chapel Yard, Feathers Yard, Hoppers Yard and Lees Yard. Britain does yards particularly well. A yard promises something tucked away, a business that requires a little finding and therefore feels faintly more satisfying when you do. You see a narrow entrance between two buildings, somebody has put a small sign outside, and naturally you go in. There may be a gallery at the end, or clothes, or ceramics, or some beautifully made domestic object you hadn't previously realised existed as a category. Twenty minutes disappear.
This makes Holt a particularly good place for the old-fashioned business of going shopping, which is not quite the same thing as buying things. We have become extraordinarily efficient at the latter. At eleven o'clock at night, without leaving the sofa, you can decide that what your life lacks is a lemon squeezer and be presented with several thousand of them, ranked by price, popularity and the considered opinions of people called Darren. It is miraculous and extremely useful, but it isn't much of a day out.
Going shopping requires inefficiency. You walk down a street without knowing exactly what you're looking for. You stop at windows. You pick something up, decide against it, have lunch, think about it again and return an hour later. Nobody sends you an email to announce that YOU LEFT SOMETHING BEHIND. The thing has simply remained on the shelf while you made up your mind. Independent shops are particularly good at this kind of commerce because discovery is part of what they're selling, even if they would never put it in those terms.
Holt also has the great advantage of Bakers & Larners, a proper provincial department store, which is one of Britain's more endangered pleasures. Every good market town should have at least one business that appears to have been there before everyone currently alive and gives every indication of intending to remain after they've gone. A traditional department store feels different from a modern retail destination because its departments seem to have accumulated over time rather than been conceived simultaneously in a meeting room. Food, wine, clothes, kitchen equipment and gifts coexist with the comfortable assumption that a person interested in one might, at some point, require another. This is how shops worked before an algorithm had to point out that people who buy trousers also occasionally eat cheese.
But the interesting thing about Holt isn't really any individual business. It is the accumulation of them. One good independent shop is a pleasant surprise; enough of them begin to alter the economy and identity of a place. Few people will drive 40 minutes because a town contains a nice candle, but they may well do so for a good bookshop, somewhere worth having lunch, galleries, antiques, clothes, food and several places selling the aforementioned candle. The businesses make one another more useful. The café keeps you there through lunchtime, lunch gives you another hour, the gallery takes you down a street you hadn't explored and the street reveals the bookshop. Money moves around the town in small increments and everybody benefits from the fact that the visitor has found another reason not to leave yet.
North Norfolk has become particularly adept at this. It attracts an interesting mixture of farming families, artists, holidaymakers, London escapees and people capable of discussing paint colours for considerably longer than seems medically advisable. Inevitably this produces a particular sort of retail economy, one in which provenance matters and customers are often prepared to pay a little more for something well made, unusual or accompanied by a good story. Sometimes they are prepared to pay considerably more.
There is an obvious danger. Successful independent towns can become so pleased with their own taste that they begin to resemble theme parks devoted to tasteful consumption. The warning signs are familiar: sourdough, chalky paint, striped aprons, dried flowers, reclaimed timber and a density of artisan candles that would present a genuine fire risk if everybody lit them at once. Holt occasionally wanders towards this border, but is generally pulled back by the presence of businesses selling ordinary useful things. This matters. A beautiful ceramic cup is all very well, but eventually somebody needs a key cut.
There is still a market, too, which shouldn't feel remarkable in a place literally described as a market town, although Britain has become rather accomplished at preserving historical descriptions after dispensing with whatever originally justified them. Markets are good for towns because they make commerce visible. Vans arrive, boxes are unloaded, tables appear and people arrange things they have grown, cooked, designed or made in the hope that somebody else might want them. The entire machinery of retail is temporarily exposed. There is no warehouse hidden beyond the edge of town and very little mystery about the proposition: I have this; would you like it?
Markets also provide one of the gentler routes into business. Before the lease, the rates, the shop fitting, the website redesign and the mild nervous breakdown, there can simply be a table and a Saturday. A town that wants interesting independent businesses needs places where people can try things before they are required to become fully formed retailers, and markets have been providing exactly that service for centuries without needing to describe themselves as incubators.
The temptation when a place like Holt succeeds is to identify the things that appear to be working and reproduce them. More tasteful shops, more coordinated signage, more carefully designed public spaces; eventually somebody commissions a branding exercise and discovers that the town's values are heritage, creativity and community, at which point banners cannot be far behind. This is where everyone should become slightly nervous. The attraction of an independent town lies partly in the fact that nobody has managed to coordinate it completely. Different people have made different decisions, some excellent, some eccentric and a few objectively terrible, and the result feels like somewhere that has grown rather than somewhere that has been rolled out.
A high street in which everything has been approved by the same person isn't really a high street at all. It's an outlet village.
What Holt has achieved, rather cleverly and perhaps without entirely setting out to do so, is to become somewhere you visit simply to visit Holt. There is no single attraction requiring a ticket and no one shop carrying the burden of bringing everybody in. Instead, enough small reasons have accumulated to make the journey worthwhile: a shop, then another; coffee; a yard you hadn't noticed; lunch; a gallery; the thing you decided not to buy before lunch and have now decided you can't possibly leave without.
By late afternoon you're back at the car with several paper bags and the faint suspicion that the town has performed an elaborate retail confidence trick on you. It hasn't. It has simply remembered something many places have forgotten: give people enough good reasons to walk down a street and they probably will. Give them enough reasons to stay there, and somewhere along the way they may buy something too.
FROM THE PAVEMENT
The health of a high street isn't simply about filling empty units. It is about accumulation: enough good businesses to make the next one viable, enough variety to keep people curious, enough useful things to prevent the lovely things becoming ridiculous, and enough independence that nobody quite controls the whole.
The interesting moment comes when people stop saying, there's a good shop there, and start saying, shall we go there on Saturday?
That's when a town has really got something.
