Help design the future of Charlbury - see events 22nd Feb

Thu 20 Feb 2014, 15:54

To me the centre of Charlbury is from the Coop down towards to the pubs, post office etc. With regards to improvements I can think of a few:

- We have a number of empty shops (now including the paint shop that has closed) it would be good if we could attract the right business to fill them, i.e., not another wedding shop or paint store. These are all well and good but they seem more of an added extra to me rather than a staple shop.

- It would be good if the existing shops didn't go out of there way to steal business from each other. For example, News & Things set up a cafe and started to reduce to amount of sweets it sold, the Good Food Shop (or now the Deli) set up a competing cafe and the Post Office sells sweets. To me this makes no sense. Why have we got two very small cafes in two different shops?? The Deli now no longer sells a lot of the stuff that made it good and News & Things is pretty empty except for its magazines and the odd visitor. I think there needs to be some sort of consensus about who sells what so we don't end up with business overlapping.

- I think the new Shabby Sheep shop is awesome and it would be good if we could carry on in that vein - maybe a farm shop further along?

- I also have noticed that during last years Wilderness Festival a lot of the shops in the centre of town remained closed for most of the weekend. This seems mad, considering a lot of people from the festival ventured into Charlbury for supplies and it might have been nice for them to go grab a coffee or sandwich. I also think these shops missed out on huge amounts of business during this and other busy times.

I really think we need to have some strong businesses in Charlbury to attract visitors and the existing businesses need to make more of an effort especially over the summer months. As Patrick pointed out we have the good fortune of having train links to London so why not capitalise on that as well as having a 'Walkers are Weclome' membership. Chadlington's centre always seems to be buzzing and they only have three shops and the village is a lot smaller than Charlbury.