The retailer
A gift shop in the Yorkshire countryside was the realisation of a dream for Susie Bambridge. Even the worst of foot and mouth seemed to be over.
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Your support makes all the difference.Susie Bambridge was basking in some justifiable self-satisfaction as she drifted around the folksy West Yorkshire town of Holmfirth on the morning of 11 September. The gift and household goods shop she had always aspired to run was precisely six days old. Cursory checks had shown renovation work at the stone cottage backing on to Saddleworth Moor, which she will soon occupy, to be progressing well. Ms Bambridge, 41, bought some household essentials, returned home to her partner, Dominic (a Greater Manchester police constable still asleep after a late shift), and by 3pm was flicking through the television channels.
It was not long before what she watched unfolding started to breed some irrational anxieties – "If there's a war and a shortage of petrol, how am I going to get across the moors to the shop?" – but there was no going back. Ms Bambridge's £32,000 bank loan, matched with the same figure from her own savings, was signed off, along with a 10-year lease, well before she moved into the premises of Hebe, the shop bought as a going concern in Holmfirth's Towngate.
Holmfirth is on edge again – just when it thought the economic effects of foot and mouth disease were beaten. Its tourism officers last week reported a marginal fall in revenues from American visitors, who come because they have seen the area's most famous export, the BBC comedy Last of the Summer Wine, which is filmed here.
Financial targets are stiff. Hebe's previous owner was turning over £100,000 annually after eight years running the place and Ms Bambridge is aiming to match that, and perhaps take it up by 10 per cent. She has already taken a gamble by replacing clothes, a Hebe staple, with designer kitchenware. Her shop is one of Holmfirth's smartest, but it's a fiercely competitive market. J W Kaye, the old ironmongers three doors down, is muscling in on her kitchenware trade and even sells Nepalese knitware.
If a planned statue of Summer Wine's Compo (the late Bill Owen) brings more tourists, she'll be in the right place – around the corner from the world-famous Sid's Cafe, where the comedy's long-suffering men have been gathering for years.
And there is a chance that the whole terror thing will blow over. "Yes, we were down in trade on 12 September," she says, scanning her records of trade and finding just a handful of transactions. "But I can't read anything into that. The following Saturday and Sunday, I had a bit of a sale, selling through some clothing lines which I'm discontinuing. I had bumper days. The busiest I've had yet."
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