Hay today, Gone tomorrow
Last weekend I decided to check out a pub that's up for lease/auction in Hay-on-Wye. I last visited in the lead up to Christmas, and the big news at he the was that the Castle was up for sale. This was a bit of a worry, as Richard Booth, the self professed "King of Hay" and founder of Booths Books, had often been seen as the driving force behind Hay as a boomtown.
Fast forward three months. The Castle has now passed into the hands of the Hay Trust, and the famous honesty bookshops in the castle grounds have gone. Worse than that, however, so have some of the bookshops.
Bookends, the remainder chain, have closed up and pulled out;
Pembertons, the official festival bookshop, is gone;
The Hay Book Co shop stands empty.
Besides the pub I was looking at, I found around five "for sale" or "to let" signs around the village, including one on the Nepal Bazaar close to the car park. Cafe Hay was similarly gutted (as it had been on my earlier visit), and I also found word of a town event asking the question "Will Hay survive without books?".
I love Hay. I'd like it even without the bookshops, but I can already see the shock and horror on the faces of festival visitors in May. If even Hay, a town built on the snobbery of middle-class literati and the media-backed overseas tourist dollar, cannot withstand the bite of he recession, what hope for anything else that seeks to preserve or enhance our culture.
It's a bitter blow, and one that could so easily have been avoided.
The Welsh Development Agency did help grow the Hay Festival, but let's face it, the infrastructure of Wales makes it impossible for them to make the most of the town, located as it is as far away from any major Welsh settlement as it is possible to be. I did try to persuade colleagues at my own RDA, Advantage West Midlands, that Hay was as important for West Midlands' tourism as it is for the Welsh, and it sits in close proximity to Hereford, Leominster and Ludlow, whose own Tourism activities were transformed by AWM, and whose future looks stronger than that of the town a few yards across the Welsh border.
My belief was that a North Cotswold transport link connecting Stratford to Hay, passing through the Vale of Evesham, Malvern, and the Golden Triangle, would have been a great asset to the region, and tithe UK tourist economy. had it happened then, I genuinely believe Hay would not be struggling as it seems to be today. Perhaps if AWM were still around, Hay could still have benefitted. Perhaps the town council will bid for help from the latest initiative spearheaded by Mary Portas, Queen of Shops. but somehow, I don't think so. Funding for arts and culture is receding, the publishing industry was in flux even before the recession hit, and everyone seems to be holding on to their loose cash.
So now I find myself asking, can Hay recover?
In time, perhaps, but the wane of the paperback and rise of the e-book may mean that only the really specialist, antiquarian bookshops will survive, and on then if they have a strong internet presence. but they alone won't sustain tourism.
Similarly, the hospitality industry has been knocked, particularly pubs. The cafe culture of Hay is struggling to sustain its staffing levels, and the shops are noticeably closing for longer to save money. Only one place, The Granary, was open for breakfast last Sunday, and it's prices reflect the number of staff it needs to sustain.
I can't see it lasting without some kind of intervention. Perhaps the publishing industry has a role here, or maybe Waterstones or W H Smith. the truth is that bookshops on the high street are fading fast. Smiths has diversified, while Waterstones has swallowed up the competition. Now a specialist book MUST be ordered online, or hunted for in charity shops. The shelf life of books is so short that I now buy more from remainder shops than I do from mainstream shops. I still resist the Internet as my main supplier of books, and the high cost of POD remains a barrier.
To me the big boys should invest in high street POD shops. Hay would be the perfect place to trial it. Imagine going into a bookshop and choosing the size format, the font, the paper and the print quality of your new book. That's what POD promises but doesn't deliver.
Yet.
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