Our Market Kitchen provides refreshments & cake, where a cuppa & piece of cake is only £1.50, cheapest in area. You may ask who are Shirehampton Markets? It all began with the local community plan survey and from that local markets and community events were highlighted as a need in Shirehampton. However, we went one step further and wanted to share our markets and events with the four villages -
Avonmouth, Shirehampton, Sea Mills/Coombe Di**le and Lawrence Weston - and beyond, after all who doesn't like a good market? Shirehampton Markets is a non-profit community organisation run by volunteers and part of Shirehampton Community Action Forum (SCAF). Without their help Shirehampton Markets would not exist. We started with zero and SCAF stepped in to pay for the initial costs to set up our first market at The Tithe Barn in Shirehampton. After many months of research 15 market traders took a chance with us and became part of our High Street Market history with our very first event opening on Thursday 5th September 2019. Since then, we have progressed to running a successful local community market for all our local communities and beyond to use. It is growing in popularity, and we have a good mix of lovely market traders, some who are local to our area, selling in some cases bespoke, handmade, unique items including eco and upcycled goods and hot food to eat in or take away for lunch or dinner later in the day. All affordable prices. We also run seasonal Community Fayres 3 times a year at the Public Hall, Station Road, Shirehampton which are held on a Saturday. We ran the highly successful 'The Queen's Platinum Jubilee Celebrations' on 21st May 2022 at this venue which also doubled as our Spring Fayre. This was a joint venture with St. Bernards Catholic Primary School which is opposite the Public Hall and gave extra space and additional games on offer. All our events have our communities in mind. The core team of Shirehampton Markets is Ash Bearman, Katherine Birth and Kathryn Courtney who have a good mix of experience of community, events, fundraising, management, media and PR. We are volunteers too and love doing what we do. Of course, we have some fabulous volunteers who help in the Market Kitchen, but we are in need of some additional volunteers to help with set up and take down of the markets and community fayres, putting up signage on lamp posts informing market/community fayre today and taking signage down at end of the day. Please email or message us on FaceBook if you are able to help, especially with our community fayres. We support local small business at all our events and some of our stall holders have gone on to open their own shops. We also support our local High Street and do not have stalls that are already on our High Street such as butchers, pet supplies, electrical goods for example. What we do have are stalls who provide goods & services that are not available on our High Street such a fishmonger, garden plants, clothes & accessories from babies up to adults, teas, jewellery, ceramics and personal care for example. We also have games & arts and crafts activities especially during the school holidays and at our Saturday Community Fayres. We run competitions that take you on a discovery of our High Street such as 'Find The Sunflowers' hunt that many of our shops take part in. Feedback has been excellent from both families and shop keepers who find it fun to do. Just don't forget to collect your prize at the end of the hunt! We survived the Coronavirus pandemic, and we will adapt and survive the cost-of-living crisis too. We have some exciting upcoming markets and events for 2023 with our communities in mind. Don't forget visit each month to find out more. We hope you love it. :-)
