This video gives a brief glimpse Rotherham Market in 1971, a bustling place, alive with the cries of 'Strawberries! Two shilling a punnet!'; 'Yes we have no Bananas!'. Yes, gentle reader, this was Rotherham at the time the first Microprocessor was invented, Led Zeppelin first performed Stairway to Heaven live, Swiss women were allowed to vote, Jim Morrison's disgraceful drug bloated corpse is found in a Paris bath tub and Britain completes it's coinage decimalisation on the imaginatively named Decimal Day. This is a Rotherham 17 years before the construction began of the Isengard like structure at Meadowhell, casting its long and black shadow over the crumbling remains of our town. Today however, not everything is as bleak as it seems and this is the view of the present day market in complete contrast to the rest of town:
'Second hand Playstation Games! Two pound a punnet!' 'Yes we have no XBox 360s!'
The market still survives as a centre piece for Rotherham commerce. Please bear in mind this is the second hand market where one can buy LPs for the princely sums of £1 or 50p depending on which boutique you peruse. A thrifty man can make a killing here. But for your own safety, please keep moving, stay close together and don't make eye contact as we move on through the crowds. We have a tight schedule here and I want to show you that not everything in the market is peaches and cream. We will be ascending the to the balcony level, so mind the steps. In greater times the balcony of Rotherham market was the proud stamping ground of those with enough pocket money to buy computer games like the sublime Jet Set Willy at Microfun, pause to point at the rabbits in the pet shop next door, buy a radio controlled model car at the model shop or even some fishing tackle at G&S Hampstead. How times have changed:
'This town, is coming like a ghost town'
'Do you remember the good old days, before the ghost town?'
Displaying the sad alienation found in a Edward Hopper painting, these shops have long closed down. Gone are the Spectrum Games, gone are the Parrots, gone are 1/35th scale tanks, gone are the Crystal Wagglers. I had a request from a Mr Paul Ruddick esq as to the state of these places. He further wished to know how Coopers Toys had fared in these testing times. I felt that the balcony scene was too heartbreaking already, so to give pictorial evidence of the state of the shop which Darth Vader once visited would bring the man to the brink of suicide. We leave this sorry row of empty shops peering out into bleak desolation and give up on ever finding an open boutique. We must turn to the baser pleasures for our delectation if we are to remain in the townstead any longer. We are about to embark on a night out in Rotherham, but that is all to come in Part Four. So get your dancing shoes ready!
A popular phrase has it that a picture paints a thousand words, so I shall wrap up this part with a piece of tragic irony, located on one of Rotherham's main thoroughfares:
