Bishop Auckland’s market place reopens after £19m revamp, but half the shops are still empty

The hoardings came down in Bishop Auckland on Saturday after three years and £19m of works that have given the County Durham market town a new market place, a restored Victorian town hall and a fountain where the bus shelters used to be. By Monday morning the question on Fore Bondgate was whether anyone would come.

The scheme, funded by the government’s towns fund and Durham county council, has repaved the market place in sandstone, removed through traffic, planted 40 trees and reopened the town hall’s 1860 assembly room as a 300-seat concert hall and cinema. A weekly market, which had shrunk to nine stalls, returned on Saturday with 34 and a crowd the council put at 8,000.

Yet 23 of the 46 retail units on the market place and Newgate Street remain empty, according to a count by the town’s chamber of trade, a vacancy rate of 50% that is among the worst in the north-east. The town lost its last bank in 2023 and a department store that had traded since 1911 closed during the works. Traders say the building site itself cost them customers.

“I have survived three years of fences and diggers and a bus stop that moved four times,” said Pauline Sayer, who has run a wool and haberdashery shop on the square since 1998. “It looks beautiful. I want it to look busy. On Saturday it did. On Monday I had 11 customers.”

The town has a stronger hand than many. The Auckland Project, the charity that has spent more than £150m of a private donor’s money since 2012 restoring the bishops’ palace, building a Spanish art gallery and a mining art museum, and staging a summer open-air show that draws 100,000 visitors, is the largest employer in the town centre. Its chief executive, David Maddan, said the market place works were “the missing piece”. He added: “People came to see the castle and the gallery, and they walked through a car park to get there. Now they walk through a town.”

The county council has offered 12 months’ rent-free occupation of six council-owned units to independent traders, and said four had been let, to a bakery, a bicycle repairer, a secondhand bookshop and a barber. A former bank is to become a food hall with eight kitchens, due to open in March. The council’s cabinet member for economy, Janet Forster, said the town’s problem was not a lack of visitors but their failure to spend: “We have 300,000 people a year coming to Bishop Auckland for the castle and the show, and until Saturday the high street gave them no reason to stay an hour longer.”

The town hall’s first concert, by a Durham brass band, sold out its 300 seats on Saturday night. The fountain, which the council says will be switched off in frost, ran for the first time at noon. A group of teenagers put washing-up liquid in it by four o’clock.