Down Market – Reviving England’s market towns (1/2)

Too many market towns in England are failing to deliver decent life prospects for their middle- and lower-income residents. They have suffered too long from policy neglect, bad planning, and poor public transport. To realise the human and economic potential of market towns, we need investment, empowerment, and intellectual boldness.

Down Market is part 1 of 2, setting out the history of English market towns and the problems they face today. Part 2, Up Market, will set out how we can fix and make them fit for the future.

Chandra’s choice

Chandra and her parents faced a difficult decision.

She had been offered a place to study at a highly-regarded local college. The teachers at the comprehensive school in her small market town were delighted for this popular and hard-working pupil.

The problem arose when she had to work out the practicalities of getting to the college. The course was an industry-focused science subject, which meant being on campus most days for classes in the morning. Here is where the casual cruelty of disadvantage kicked in.

Chandra couldn’t drive and her parents needed their cars to get to their 9 to 5 jobs. The branch trainline between the town and the city where the college was located had been cut years earlier.

That left Chandra reliant on the local bus network, which was no solution at all. The locals in the town rolled their eyes and let out a hollow laugh when they described the notoriously unreliable ‘service’. She would need to take several different buses, each way, with an unpredictable wait when switching routes. The journey would be long, circuitous, and expensive.

In the winter months, she would have to wait at the first bus stop just as dawn was breaking. Would you want your teenage child starting the day at a remote bus stop in the cold and dark? No, nor would I. And nor did Chandra or her parents.

With sadness and regret, she turned down the college’s offer.

Failed and frustrated

I heard about Chandra’s story when I was facilitating a discussion with a group of young residents. I was preparing a strategy for their town and wanted to hear directly what they thought of the place they called home.

I’ve facilitated hundreds of such discussions. Chandra’s story has stayed with me for two reasons. The first is that her situation encapsulates the wider story to be found in market towns in every part of England. On the surface, her hometown appeared to be a great place to grow up.

Like other market towns, it was “packed with typical English charm — with cobbled streets, bustling market stalls and historic buildings.” Dig a little deeper, however, and you find many more families like Chandra’s, being failed and frustrated by inadequate infrastructure, a sluggish local economy, and patchy public services.

The other aspect that stuck with me was the manner in which the participants relayed the story. They were ambitious for their own lives and careers but talked with weary resignation about their town.

It was a fact of life, as immutable as the sun rising in the morning, that the bus would turn up late, if at all. The same went for the town centre; the only thing you could do on the high street was buy a vape pen, put a bet on, or get your nails done. They had the impression that government didn’t much care about their town or the thousands of places like. It’s not hard to see why.

Market towns have been neglected by central government for decades. Despite mounting evidence that the picture-postcard image of quaint teashops belies mounting social and economic problems. Let me answer some basic questions about market towns, before I set out why they deserve our attention. The questions are:

· What is a market town?

· How have they evolved?

· What is the modern function of a market town?

· What state are they in?

· Why are market towns not on the agenda?

Part 2 will, essentially, answer one question: how to fix them and realise their human and economic potential.

As with all my writing, my analysis and conclusions are based on over 20 years of developing, delivering, and evaluating regeneration and economic development plans and strategies in every part of the country.

Finally, if you haven’t already assumed this, Chandra wasn’t her real name, and I have left some details deliberately vague.

What is a market town?

There are two ways to answer this question: with the historic definition; and with the contemporary one. Let’s start with the historic definition.

Market towns were places on the edge of larger settlements that became specialist centres for trading goods. Typically, farmers and other producers from the surrounding rural hinterland would travel to the market once or twice per week to sell their wares in an open-air square.

They were usually located on or near road- and river-crossings, which historically allowed buyers and sellers to gather and trade. You don’t need to be a linguist or historian to work out how Cowbridge in the Vale of Glamorgan got its name, or why it has hosted a farmers’ market for nearly a millennium.

The Domesday Book of 1086 lists 50 market towns. Officially, the designation of being a market town could only be granted by royal charter but, in reality, many places were referred to as market towns without the monarch’s blessing.

The title of being a ‘market town’ has stuck for over a millennium. As John Clare put it in the poem ‘Market Day’, they “keep their pace that nothing can provoke”. Although, as we’ll see, the primary function of the many of those towns has changed over time.

How have they evolved?

King John was the Liz Truss of the medieval period. In his short reign, he damaged the country’s international prestige and cost the nation a fortune when a cart carrying his treasury sank to the bottom of a marsh. Despite all of this, he does have a small but significant role in our story.

Market Towns have already been through two cycles of growth and decline: the medieval; and the industrial. We are currently living through the third, the modern cycle in their evolution. How long this cycle lasts, and how it ends, is up to us.

At the end of each cycle, market towns have been left catering to a smaller and smaller number of beneficiaries. Culminating in the situation in which we find ourselves today. The market towns of the early 21st Century cater very well to the needs of a small number of high-income households. While the majority of middle- and lower-income residents are expected to put up with low-paid gig-economy jobs, empty high streets, and poor transport provision.

Medieval cycle

The first expansion in the number of market towns was powered by two forces: state protection; and overlapping socio-economic trends. This period covered the first half of the last millennium.

State protection was granted when a market became officially chartered by the Crown. When this was granted, markets within a six-mile radius were prohibited from operating on the same day. At the same time, England’s economic and social structures were evolving in a way that fuelled the growth and expansion of market towns.

After the signing of Magna Carta, when King John ceded some of his power to the land-holding barons, vast areas of England were owned by mercantile lords. They charged traders for the right to hold markets on their land, and thus had a strong interest in protecting them. The ‘Tolsey’ building in Ludlow Market is where the traders would pay their levy or toll to the local landowner. The economy was also transitioning from a barter-based system to one that used cash.

The number of market towns grew from 50 in 1086 to around 2,000 in 1349. As the number of markets grew, they became more competitive and, in response, increasingly specialised. Saffron Walden was known simply as Walden until it became famous for growing crocuses. Tetbury was the go-to place for wool. Matching Tye in Essex was famous for its jacket, shirt and ‘matching tye’ outfits. Actually, that’s not true, but it was the birthplace of Rik Mayall, so it does have one legitimate claim to fame.

The town of Worsted became synonymous with a type of yarn. Although the reputation of the material had declined by Shakespeare’s time, if Kent’s convoluted insult in King Lear is anything to go by: “[Thou art] a knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave.”

This expansion was followed by a period of decline as urban centres grew and became more prosperous and permanent shops thus became a common feature in their centres. A tradesperson surrounded by a customer base in the walls of a city no longer needed to travel around selling their wares on the road. It was cheaper, easier, and safer to open a fixed store in a town centre.

Industrial cycle

The second cycle of growth was catalysed by the onset of the industrial revolution and the early decades of what would become the British and other European empires. The period covered the latter half of the last millennium.

The “Age of Discovery”, as it is euphemistically known, created new trading routes. These routes brought novel products to UK shores, such as silk and tea from China, spices from Asia, and tobacco and coffee from the ‘New World’. The proliferation of new and exotic products provided a short-term boost to market towns.

However, as towns and cities grew at breakneck speed thanks to industrialisation and the parallel de-population of the countryside, market towns once again entered a period of decline and depopulation. In effect, British cities became vast markets for the trading of goods from across the globe. Thus, rendering market towns largely redundant.

Modern cycle

The third cycle started in the middle of the last century with an attempt by central government to protect market towns and other rural and semi-rural settlements, long battered by the economic forces described above, from further decline. This was largely a success, although the measures enacted also led to many unintended consequences that have created the problems we see today.

A series of parliamentary acts gave local authorities much greater powers to control and constrain housing developments. Council used these new powers enthusiastically, effectively granting ‘protected status’ to swathes of the countryside. The aim was to confine the growth of housing and industrial development to existing conurbations.

Some market towns were given a further boost when, from the 1950s onward, they were designated as “key developments” or “rural service centres”. This means they were in pole position for new investment, infrastructure, and public sector jobs.

This led to another rise in the popularity and importance of market towns and a further narrowing down of the number of people who were benefitted from that growth. As the UK Parliament’s Select Committee of the Rural Economy put it, “wealthier urban dwellers began to see the countryside as a place of leisure or as a desirable place to relocate.”

This wouldn’t be a problem if we were building new homes at the same time. However, Britain is worryingly bad at this core civilisational task. Especially in rural and semi-rural areas where the planning system is stacked against the construction of anything but small number of expensive executive homes.

When wealthier households buy these new-builds as second homes, the pool is further reduced. As the academic Costis Hadjimichalis put it in European Planning Studies, “new urban middle classes have the upper hand; they consume both urban and rural space, living in towns and having a second home in rural areas, or living in the countryside and working in towns.”

What is the modern function of a market town?

The modern definition of market towns is more ambiguous than the historic one. Although we can establish some broad criteria and characteristics.

In 2004, the Countryside Agency calculated there were 1,274 distinct market towns in England. There is no reason to believe that this number has changed significantly since then. The government-based membership body Action for Market Towns estimated in 1999 that they were home to five million people and served a rural population of a further five million.

In terms of size, market towns today have a population of between 2,000 and 30,000. According to Countryside Agency statistics, more than half (56%) are at the smaller end of that scale, with between 2,000 and 5,000 residents.

They remain geographically close to larger population centres, but without being a fully absorbed suburb. They exist on the threshold, in the liminal space between rural and urban.

What has changed, often significantly, is their role and purpose. In their paper ‘Market towns: understanding and maintaining functionality’, the academics Neil A. Powe and Trevor Hart identified the five most common modern functions of contemporary market towns.

Service centres. Service centres act as public service and amenity hubs for the surrounding rural hinterland. Accordingly, these towns tend to be further away from larger population centres but better connected to nearby villages and hamlets. This is the most common function; of the 1,274 market towns identified by the Countryside Agency, 499 fell into this category.

Visitor attractions. As the name suggests, the economy and brand focus of visitor attractions is on a tourist offer, whether that is an historic asset or a purpose-built facility like Butlins in Minehead. The authors draw a distinction between ‘key visitor’ and ‘day tripper’ places. The difference between the two is the typical length of stay and, subsequently, the type of visitor accommodation of offer.

Employment centres. The main purpose of employment centres is to provide jobs to residents of the surrounding area. The public sector often has a strong presence in these towns as they are home to the town and / or district councils and related public sector agencies.

Housing commuters. These are towns which effectively act as dormitory neighbourhoods for the sub-regional workforce. They are geographically closer to nearby towns and cities and / or have excellent transport links that can sustain large numbers of commuter journeys at peak times.

Housing the retired. The fifth and final function is similar to the commuter role, but catering to a very different demographic. Some market towns have become specialised in the provision of housing for retired people. This category incorporates both houses in ‘retirement villages’ and more specialist forms of sheltered and supported housing for people with care needs.

Three things stand out from this list. The first is that these functions have developed due to the location of market towns. They have little, if anything, to do with their historic status as market towns. Thus posing profound question about what being a ‘market town’ means in the modern world.

Second, each function caters primarily or exclusively to an external audience; sightseers, commuters, incoming retirees. None of these functions is premised on meeting the needs and expectations of existing residents.

Third, as a result, the opportunity for local residents to benefit from these activities is limited. Jobs in the tourism industry are, generally, low-paid, short-term, and seasonal. A care home in a market town will generate a fixed number of jobs, but the money to pay for provision goes straight to the care home provider.

What state are they in today?

A typical ‘SWOT’ analysis template. Image credit: Business Network International

I knew the workshop was going to be difficult when I invited the team leader and her colleagues to conduct a ‘SWOT analysis’ of their neighbourhood. Their task was to list the strengths and weaknesses of the place, and the opportunities and threats that it faced, using a grid like the one above.

My heart sank as the quadrants marked W and T filled up and S and O were left almost completely blank. The welcome sign for the area might as well have read “Abandon all hope, ye who enter”.

Yet even that group would struggle to be so thoroughly pessimistic about English market towns after a weekend spent in the best of them. Obviously, the articles I write are focused on problems and what we can do to fix them. But it’s also important to recognise all the good, positive, hopeful, and optimistic things. Here, I’ve highlighted six of the key strengths of English market towns.

Strengths

Strong housing markets. As we’ve already touched on, they are popular and desirable places to live. According a 2020 report by Lloyds Bank, house-buyers should expect to pay a 12% or £33,000 premium for the privilege of living in an English market town.

That’s just the average. According to the bank’s Mortgage Director, prices in the most popular market towns, which are concentrated in the South East, are “as much as double the county average”.

Assets. They contain buildings and other assets of historic and cultural importance. Visit any market town, including those you don’t typically find in the ‘Top ten’ lists, and you will find examples of wonder, beauty, and civic pride.

‘The best of both worlds’. Due to their location, market towns can offer some of the benefits of urban and rural life. They are often a short commute from well-paying jobs in the nearest city in one direction, and a pleasant drive into the countryside in the other. You can head into the city on a Saturday for socialising and shopping, then spend the Sunday in the quiet and solitude of the country.

Retail re-growth. This combination is attractive to retailers as well as house-buyers. While most high streets and town centres continue to struggle, there is some evidence that market towns are proving more resilient and attractive. According to fashion trade specialists, “apart from lower rental costs from their larger-city equivalents, market towns offer two main benefits to retailers: an appealing, traditional retail-focused location with access to often affluent remote workers.

Tourism. Taking together all the factors so far listed, it is no surprise that some market towns have retained a strong tourism market. These places are very well-positioned to take advantage of the staycation trend.

Strong brand. Finally, market towns have a reputation that appeals very strongly to many people. As the researcher and consultant Jessica Sellick puts it, market towns are “viewed as dozy, quaint or affluent places where people want to live, compared to a box of chocolates or picture postcard.”

All of these strengths should be acknowledged. The problem is that the positive aspects of life in market towns tend to benefit the newcomers and incomers, while longer-standing residents have to live with the disadvantages. Rising house prices are great news for homeowners in possession of an appreciating asset; and terrible news for a young family with no way of affording a deposit.

Weaknesses

Down Market. Let’s start with an issue that people find it hard to acknowledge. Like ‘mining villages’ that no longer have a mine, or the unfortunate “shopping centre with no shops”, the market in many market towns is at best an irrelevance and at worst an eyesore.

Markets that offer empty lots or poor-quality goods, in tatty and neglected surroundings, turn away visitors and dent local pride. And yet, the idea of re-purposing the market for another activity, or converting / re-developing it into houses or offices can be greeted with horror.

Such neuralgic sensitivity is understandable. Imagine you are the Mayor of a place that has been a market town since the first edition of the Domesday Book. Do you want be the one to build an office block on the market square?

That said, we elect leaders to lead. In Urban-Rural Interdependencies — Exploring the Role of Market Towns, the rural author, consultant, and expert Alison Caffyn is talking specifically about two case-study towns that she researched in fascinating detail. But her point applies to hundreds of places: “The time is ripe to identify a new future for the market in each town, to tackle the location and appearance of the market site and reinforce its identity”.

In part 2, I’ll argue further that we need a new approach to markets in market towns, and make suggestions for what we can do with them.

The decline of local markets if, of course, bound up with the general trend away from traditional shopping patterns. As I wrote in ‘Death of the Salesmen’, the old model of high street retail is broken.

Transport. Put simply, the train and bus services within market towns, and between market towns and surrounding towns and cities, are inadequate, unreliable, and expensive.

Of the 1,274 market towns identified by the Countryside Agency, only half had a working train station. Some of those without a rail service will have fallen victim to the Beeching cuts in the 1960s. Others will have been whittled down over time, until the service was abolished, or the town became a ‘request stop’.

An efficient, affordable, coordinated bus service can replace a train route. But, in many parts of the country we have multiple inefficient, unaffordable, and uncoordinated bus services. Bus routes are run on a skeletal basis, if they exist at all, and we are starting to see city-regions bring services back under public control.

In August 2023, the Traffic Commissioners for Great Britain found that a quarter of all bus services in England had been cut or downgraded in the previous two years. The total number of local route registrations fell from 12,000 in 2021 to just under 9,000 in 2023.

You can find many more stats if you want to understand the terrible state of buses in England. Or you can just ask people like Chandra.

Dormitory towns and retirement villages. The greatest threat to the vitality and social cohesion of market towns is their gradual transition into dormitory towns for a commuter workforce or retirement villages for the elderly.

A vibrant, mixed use town will have some commuters and some retirees. It will also have younger households buying their first homes, single people able to work and live comfortably on a decent ages, and larger families living in social housing. The risk is that the planning system only builds homes for commuters and retirees. A town centre cannot thrive if most of the workforce leave the town at dawn and return at dusk.

By the early 1990s, there was already an established pattern of developers meeting demand from affluent and upwardly-mobile households by building executive homes on the fringes of market towns. As Craig Wheway put it in The transformation of English market towns: gentrification “this middle class incursion was physically reflected through new build developments that have been targeted at market towns”. This pushes up house prices for existing residents, for whom home ownership becomes more of an aspiration than an expectation.

Low-paid, seasonal jobs. As well as distorting the housing market, the house-buildings patterns just described also use up land that could be used for industrial and commercial development. This distorts the labour market too, and leaves workers further reliant on low-paid and / or seasonal jobs.

This is one of the major issues highlighted by Claffyn. As she points out, unemployment is usually lower in market towns compared to many towns and cities, but “much of the work which is available is seasonal, low paid, part time or temporary”.

Uncoordinated education provision. The problem with education in market towns is not always quality. There are some excellent schools in and around market towns. It is the patchy and uncoordinated nature of provision.

This manifests in a number of ways: over-provision of certain courses, and a consequent under-supply of other, often more technical subjects; the lack of pathways between schools, colleges, and universities; limited adult education opportunities; and weak careers advice.

These problems are not exclusive to market towns. But, pupils and parents in cities can compensate for poor provision by finding alternatives. If the sixth form in one school doesn’t offer a qualification in a certain course, they can go to the local college instead. That doesn’t apply in a smaller town where choice and competition are limited.

This connects with the transport problem. Limited local provision is less of a problem if people can access services elsewhere. As we’ve already discussed, the poor state of public transport in many market towns shuts down the option of learners accessing courses outside their immediate vicinity.

Social exclusion. The combination of a distorted housing market, low-paid jobs, and patchy education provision has created pockets of poverty in market towns. This goes against the quaint vision of traditional English market towns. But it remains a “present, if not visible, problem.”

As well as young people like Chandra who are excluded from opportunities to get on in life, older people in market towns are likely to suffer from loneliness and isolation, and find it harder to access services.

Environmental threats. Finally, we have to address the environmental threats to market towns,. Especially those that were built near to rivers. Historic England’s Celebrating Our Distinctive Heritage report highlights the dual risk to market towns and other historic settlements caused by climate change. The first is the damage caused by more extreme and unpredictable events like flash flooding. The second is the risk of flood defences spoiling a town’s historic character and appearance.

Why are market towns not on the agenda?

In ancient Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. After she reneged on a promise to pledge herself to the god Apollo, he placed a curse on her. For the rest of her life, she would see the future with unerring accuracy, but her predictions and premonitions of doom would always be ignored by her fellow mortals.

She warned the Trojans that the Greeks were hiding in the wooden horse they had left at the city gate. The people continued their festivities while insulting and abusing her. In the early 2000s, the Countryside Agency played the role of Cassandra in the corridors of Whitehall. It foresaw and foretold that central government was about to leave market towns neglected in policy terms. And it was ignored.

Central neglect

There are two reasons why market towns are not on the agenda. The first is that central government has largely neglected them for decades.

There was a brief flurry of intervention in market towns in the early 2000s. The Market Towns Initiative was launched in 2000 and rolled-out England from 2001. It was funded and administered by the Countryside Agency, the successor body to the Rural Development Commission.

Through the initiative, partnerships of local agencies and community groups were awarded funding to: undertake a ‘health-check’ of a town’s strengths and weaknesses; develop a practical action plan; and appoint coordinators and project managers to deliver the plan.

The health-checks were the first sign that things were starting to go wrong in market towns. A meta-analysis of health-checks in the West Midlands, conducted by KPMG, highlighted many of the problems identified in the previous section: house prices rising beyond the budget of local people; poor transport links; retail trends away from traditional high streets and town centres; and an ageing population placing greater demands on public services with already limited capacity.

The Market Towns Initiative could and should have been the first step in a sequence of measures to deal with these problems. Instead, the programme was closed down and nothing took its place. The Countryside Agency warned that as “no single organisation is championing the cause for market towns”, they would be forgotten.

There is still no government policy with regard to market towns. No analysis of the problems, no theory of change, no policy prescription for reviving those that are struggling the most.

In 2023, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak started talking about re-orienting policy away from cities toward towns. That may signal a renewed policy interest in market towns.

Lack of local capacity

If the problems are growing, and government has been ignoring them, why hasn’t there been more controversy? This is where we arrive at the second problem: the lack of local capacity.

Some of this is down to the hollowing out of local government as part of austerity but, in truth, the problem precedes the election of 2010. As in other areas of policy, we are fooling ourselves and each other if we think reversing budget cuts is all that is needed to solve deeper problems.

The official assessment of the Market Towns Initiative highlighted a lack of capacity at the local level back in 2004. The town health-check was a fairly straightforward part of the process; a review of local strengths and weaknesses as a prerequisite to developing an action plan.

Yet many local partnership experienced “difficulties” with “the size of the task, getting people involved and accessing the right information”. Some even found it “daunting”. The lack of local capacity is not a new problem.

It is an old problem with three causes.

The first is that governance in the UK is chronically over-centralised. Local government has less power and fewer levers to effect change, compared to most other advanced democracies.

The second is that responsibility for market towns can be diffuse. Three different layers of government can have responsibility for what happens in and around a market town: the town, district, and county councils. In towns where central government has a presence, as a landowner or employer, you have another major player.

For the third problem, I want to draw on some insights into how and why humans make mistakes, and why different types of mistake have different outcomes. Based on his observations of human error and risk management, the academic Charles Perrow argued that mistakes have the worst outcomes when they occur in systems that are both complex and what he termed “tightly coupled”.

A complex system is self-explanatory; there are lots of moving parts with multiple relationships and inter-dependencies. “Tightly coupled” means that the different parts are very closely bound together. There is no slack in the system and so, when one element malfunctions, it has an immediate impact on the others.

The ‘Undercover Economist’ Tim Harford gives a row of dominoes as a simple example of a tightly coupled system. Knock over one domino, and it will topple the next, which will topple the next, and so on. It takes outside intervention to stop this process, because there is insufficient power in the system to self-correct; a domino cannot stop itself from falling over.

By contrast, a medium-sized city is an example of a complex but loosely coupled system. Let’s say a large factory in the city closes. It will, of course, have an impact. But the city as a whole is large, diverse, and dynamic enough to respond that disruption. The unemployed workers will find other jobs, perhaps in other factories that are now growing because a competitor is out of the picture. The companies supplied by the factory will find other suppliers. Ditto consumers.

A small market town is a complex but tightly-coupled system. It does not have the spare capacity found in a constantly churning and evolving city. So, when a significant employer closes down, it has an immediate and lasting impact. Businesses in the supply chain suffer. The cafes that fed the workforce at lunchtime have to make cutbacks. With fewer jobs around, some workers will struggle to get back into the labour market.

Part of the solution for struggling market towns is to reduce the complexity involved in getting things done, while increasing capacity, so they are less tightly coupled and more resilient. That’s for part 2. For now, let’s conclude part 1.

“He sent you a priest, a rabbi, and a Quaker, Mr. President”

There is a famous scene in an early episode of The West Wing in which President Bartlet agonises over whether to pardon a death-row inmate. As a Liberal and a Catholic who believes in the sanctity of life, he wants to commute the sentence. As a politician, he knows that doing so would make him deeply unpopular.

The episode is called “Take This Sabbath Day” and, throughout that day, Bartlet seeks the advice of a range of religious leaders, as well as his own God. After hours of prevarication, the President summons his childhood priest. The pastor is a man of advanced age and is no longer intimated by titles or the trappings of power.

Father Cavanaugh confronts the President with the truth. God has been sending messengers to the President all along, but the President kept ignoring the answer: “He sent you a priest, a rabbi, and a Quaker, Mr. President. What do you want from him?”

For the past thirty years, we’ve been repeating President Bartlet’s error by ignoring the consistent and increasingly loud messages about the growing problems in English market towns. It’s no surprise that some of the places with the strongest pro-Brexit votes, like Boston in Lincolnshire, Wisbech in Fenland, and Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, were market towns.

Perhaps, if we had heeded those warnings, market towns would work for the many, not just the few. A decent and affordable home would be within the reach of middle-income families. Permanent, well-paid jobs would be available to local workers. Public transport would enable people to get those jobs, training places, and study courses efficiently and affordably.

And after all her hard work, Chandra would have been able to get to college, taking the first step to realising her potential.

In Part 2, Up Market, we’ll look at how to make those things a reality.