What the Dickens: historic English town rebels against the tyranny of Clone Britannia

It has long been referred to as Clone Britannia – the deadening ubiquity of Britain’s town centres, all crammed with the same big chains such as Poundland and Pret-a-Manger. The identikit line-ups make many areas feel depressingly similar. Yet some towns are fighting back by refusing to conform.

Shrewsbury, a handsome medieval market town in England’s West Midlands, is famous as the birthplace of the naturalist Charles Darwin. As the town has evolved, so Shrewsbury has embraced a burgeoning spirit of independence – vast swathes of the centre are now no-go zones for big names, with entire streets reserved instead for smaller, independent shopkeepers.

The brand-free bastion of the town is centred around Wyle Cop, a twisting, hilly, historic old thoroughfare that, at almost 400m, is billed by local officials as the “longest run of uninterrupted independent businesses in the UK”.

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The claim cannot be sourced to anywhere apart from the town’s marketing bumpf – businesses on a street in Bristol, meanwhile, claims theirs is the longest stretch of independents in Europe. But regardless of the strict accuracy of Shrewsbury and Wyle Cop’s boast, the street is still undeniably a menagerie of curiosity and charm, a deviation from the stultifying sameness that blights Britain.

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“Why would you visit anywhere different if you already know what it’s going to be like,” says Mike Hale, a former RAF engineer who is now an evangelist for “the Cop”, where he owns the little Wrekin Whiskies shop. “Just look up as you walk around here and you’ll see how different it is. And where else would you find a Victorian underground steam heating system for the street?”

Wyle Cop is lined on both sides by a crooked jumble of ancient timber-framed buildings, many of them listed, that house a motley collection of different shops with not a big chain in sight.

There is no Holland & Barrett on Wyle Cop, but you will find the Shrewsbury Herbarium. No DFS, but instead there is A Little Furniture Shop; no Smyth’s, but a Toybox; no Costa, but the Condor cafe; no Waterstones, but a Left for Dead independent bookstore and vinyl shop.

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“It’s like a little community,” says Pollyanna Williams, who opened her colourful Snoop lifestyle store on the street eight months ago. “Everybody is so lovely and friendly. You feel really supported here.”

There are other significant enclaves of independent shops dotted around Shrewsbury, such as at Dogpole Street, the completely brand-free Parade Shops centre in an old infirmary, and the sprawling Market Hall at the other end of the town centre, closer to Pride Hill where all the big names gather.

But Wyle Cop is the main anchor of Shrewsbury’s revolution of independence, the linchpin of its sense of difference.

The town itself is moderately prosperous and appears to be bucking Britain’s trend of high street decline. Shrewsbury, the county town of Shropshire close to the Welsh border, 44 miles northwest of Birmingham, has an olde worlde, Dickensian feel. A walk around its cobbled streets and narrow alleyways soon reveals why.

At the other end of town away from Wyle Cop is St Chad’s church where Darwin, the most famous Salopian (a native of Shropshire), was baptised. There is an overgrown old graveyard out the back with moss-covered graves. In the middle of the burial ground, there lies an ancient-looking tomb with a broken slab. The faded inscription reads “Ebenezer Scrooge”, the character in A Christmas Carol.

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Scrooge was, of course, fictional. But St Chad’s was used for the filming in 1984 of the definitive film version of Charles Dickens’s seasonal novella. Scrooge was played by George C Scott, an American actor who famously refused an Oscar for a later role. The filmmakers left Scrooge’s on-screen grave intact as an attraction for the town.

“Some visitors think the grave is real,” says Nigel, who works part-time in Hale’s Wrekin Whiskies shop. “Somebody left flowers on it recently.”

Like some other Midlands towns, Shrewsbury is not without its problems.

Dickens visited the town on several occasions, staying in the historic old Lion Hotel at the top of Wyle Cop, where he is reputed to have given the first public reading of A Christmas Carol. The hotel shut to customers late last year and was converted into a centre for single male asylum seekers.

It left some locals torn between wanting to help people in need but also worried that one of the most important businesses on the Cop was now out of action. Others took their objections further – the top of Wyle Cop was sealed off last December after a hoax bomb scare at the hotel while, in April, a man was convicted for smashing 20 of the Lion’s windows in a racially motivated attack.

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This Christmas, Shrewsbury is also tinged with sadness. Four local teenagers – Jevon Hirst, Harvey Owen, Wilf Fitchett and Hugo Morris – were all killed in a car crash over the border in Wales. They were on their way to camp in Snowdonia, but their vehicle slid off the road and they drowned as it lay upturned in a stream and undiscovered for two days.

The shock prompted local officials to cancel the switching-on ceremony for the town’s Christmas lights, a few days later.

Yet as Salopians navigate the trials and tribulations of life, there is hope that the town centre with its independent bent can keep outperforming the high street malaise that has afflicted other areas.

Martin Westwood, who moved up from Birmingham 30 years ago, owns Think Tank, which sells military model kits. His business in the Parade centre used to sell dolls’ houses.

“The town is stuck in that loop of the river Severin, that means it has always been awkward for modern development. So the town has all these windy narrow lanes, which gives you windy narrow shops that are no use to a lot of the big names, but perfect for smaller ones,” he says.

“People around here say ‘it’s the independents that are keeping us going’. There’s pride in that. We’re doing better than many other towns that are full of vape shops and phone repair outlets.”

There are a few of those around Shrewsbury too, but almost all are congregated in a different part of town, away from the historic area around Wyle Cop.

Stacey Hill owns a clutch of independent boutiques and jewellery outlets on the street, all trading as Oberon. One of them used to be a Laura Ashley chain shop years ago – Hill, now in her 60s, worked in it when she was 16.

After a stint working in fashion in London, she returned to open her first outlet on Wyle Cop 38 years ago. Three years later, Laura Ashley left the street.

“That turned Wyle Cop into a desert for a few years because Laura Ashley used to draw people in. But slowly over the years it all built back up again.”

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Now she runs three separate Oberon outlets on Wyle Cop. She beams and then chuckles at the suggestion that it makes her the “Queen of the Cop”.

Outside on the street, local shoppers bustle as they get ready for Christmas. A man dressed up as Dickens emerges from the throng to lead a small group into the Nag’s Head pub, which is housed in a 16th-century building. Nobody bats an eyelid, customer keep supping their ales as life trundles on around them – the Salopian way.

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