Hell for leather town

Decades after its old saddle trade died off, a Midland community has struggled to adapt to the new world. Isabelle Bates speaks with locals who fear Walsall is becoming a ghost town

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WITH more than 40 empty shopping units in the centre, it’s a bleak site that greets visitors to Walsall.

The market town was once the centre of the UK’s leather and saddle trade but in recent years it has become a sea of empty shops... and lost hope.

The centre has become desolate, full of boarded-up and derelict stores covered in graffiti and smashed in windows.

It was recently named the second worst area in England to start a business and previously had one of the worst empty shop rates in Britain.

New figures also revealed the town was economically below average on nearly every front and nearly one in four residents are economically inactive.

Locals say they fear for the future of the “forgotten” town where there is “no longer any sense of community.

And frustrated shop owners say they're finding it hard to make ends meet and feel that not enough is being done to revive the rundown postindustrial town

There are around 150 shops across Walsall’s four main shopping streets, with approximately 1 in 4 lying empty.

Local businessman Harcharan Pala, who runs music store Revolution Records, said: “I've been here eight or nine years and we've seen the big shops like Debenhams and M&S disappear.

“The town is just desolate now, hardly anyone comes here. It used to be a destination town, people went out of their way to come here, but that just doesn’t happen anymore.

“Without those big anchor shops drawing people in, there's no reason for people to come shopping here anymore. They go to cities like Birmingham or Wolverhampton.

“Or they go out of town to retail parks in Cannock or Merry Hill in Dudley. We've just been left behind here. The number of empty shops is sad to see.