The need for signage: Frogmoor, High Wycombe

The market was launched in September last year after the High Wycombe Town Partnership approached the Thames Valley Farmers Market Cooperative (TVFM) asking them to open a farmers’ market. It was hoped the market would draw people into Frogmoor – an underused area of High Wycombe.

The market started with 18 stalls and looked promising, but with continued problems of signage and a subsequent lack of customers, the stallholders starting pulling out, explained market manager Diane Harker. At the last market on March 20 there were just six.

“We have spent six months we thought we had got agreement with the council to put signs up, but they have all been taken down.”

The group wanted to put up 2ft square boards advertising the market on roadsides two days before the market and promised they would be taken down immediately after.

They are the same boards used to promote the group’s other markets across Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire. Instead, the Wycombe District Council has suggested that they put up A4 size posters in shop windows but Ms Harker says this would be of “no use whatsoever”.

FARMA had carried out a ‘healthcheck’ on several of TVFM’s markets and revealed the importance of roadside signage. “Forty six per cent of customers said they knew about our markets from signs,” said Ms Harker.

It is the first farmers’ market the group has had to close due to problems with signage, she explained. The district council had also suggested moving the farmers’ market to Church Street at the end of the existing charter market. Ms Harker said she was against that idea as FARMA believed it was not a good idea to mix farmers’ markets with street markets. “It is too late now anyway as nearly all our stallholders have dropped out.”

Meanwhile another market at Little Chalfont launched by the group, a week before the Frogmoor market, has gone from strength to strength.

She said. “There was an existing little community there, which has helped and we had support from the council there.”

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