Wednesday, August 14, 2019

BRIGG MARKET MEMORIES


This picture will bring memories flooding back for Brigg people of a certain age.
It shows Stennett's Market in the early 1980s while it was still being held down Manley Gardens (housing now occupying the site).
Eric Simons, then in charge of the Thursday auctions, is seen with shoppers, fresh mushrooms, trays of eggs and a row of rabbits (right).
People paid for their purchases through a hatch at the front of a timber shed.
Inside was a small team of clerks who recorded the transactions and handled the money taken from customers and later given to suppliers.
Around 2pm they furnished the visiting reporter from the Lincolnshire & South Humberside Times newspaper with a list of that day's prices.
Stennett's moved to Barnard Avenue and then Station Road, the Brigg auction later changing hands.
Thursday sessions near the railway station ended some weeks ago and North Lincolnshire Council, which owns the site and its sales building, immediately advertised for a successor to step in.
Many Brigg people still use Stennett's as a descriptive term, just as they called the Nelthorpe Arms pub Scanlon's long after the departure of long-serving mine hosts Myles and Mary Scanlon.
It's also going to take time for Brigg Town Football Club to become the Brigg Town CIC (Community Interest Club) and The Hawthorns to be called the EC Surfacing Stadium in everyday speech.
Richardson's newsagent's, on Wrawby Street, was known for decades as Winnie's (its manageress being Winnie Cammack).
Some modern names do catch on quickly, though. Young people in Brigg rarely say they are meeting up in the White Horse; to them the pub is Wetherspoon's or (more often) just Spoons!