WHY CAN’T THIS TOWN AFFORD A BIG ISSUE VENDOR?
IT'S a mild morning in Dover. The sun’s shining over the castle and on to the docks, illuminating the discount signs in the windows of Poundstretcher on the high street. We’re here to meet Big Issue vendor Colin Davey near his home, delivering the magazines that he will later sell further along the Kent coast in Broadstairs.
Davey used to sell The Big Issue outside Boots in the heart of Dover but in the last few years, he says, the town centre “just went dead”.
“Basically, I can’t make a living here any more,” he says, speaking to me just after paying for his magazines (all Big Issue vendors buy their copies up front for £1.50 each, then sell them for £3). “The high street these days has no real shops as such. You don’t get people coming down, doing their proper shop.”
Year round, in baking heat, driving rain, bitter cold and even snow, Big Issue vendors are a mainstay of the UK’s high street. Few people are better placed to give an on-the-ground temperature check of the economic climate in Britain’s town and cities. So when The Big Issue’s director of sales and operations, Chris Falchi-Stead, said vendors were telling him something was going on in Kent, we went to find out more.
“I noticed when I came out to Kent, especially coming off the last lockdown, that where places were suffering from deprivation previously, it had been exacerbated to some mad levels,” says Falchi-Stead.
The picture in Kent is mixed. Some towns – Canterbury, Broadstairs, Westgate-On-Sea – still offer a decent opportunity for hard-working Big Issue sellers. In others, such as Dover and Margate, where you would expect a vendor to be able to make a living, it’s just not possible.
Early one morning in August, I join Falchi-Stead aboard the white van that delivers magazines to sellers all over Kent to see and hear for myself. Because of
