The playwright and Archers’ scriptwriter Tim Stimpson is queuing for a wood-fired pizza in the car park of the Stirchley United Working Men’s Club. It’s not a particularly salubrious setting for Birmingham’s first community market. There is an indoor bowling centre on one side and a sign offering “Cash 4 Scrap” on the other, with an arrow pointing down a row of Victorian terraces which have been boarded up for two years while Tesco decides whether to build on the site.

“Supermarkets come into an area, blight it, then offer to regenerate it,” sighs Stimpson, who stood as a Liberal Democrat candidate in neighbouring Bournville during the local elections, and is involved with Another Stirchley is Possible, which is campaigning against the planned Tesco development.

That alternative Stirchley is all too evident on this late summer afternoon. The stalls are attracting a higher-than-expected crowd of local residents. Matt Powell, Birmingham city council’s manager charged with finding ways to regenerate Stirchley, estimates that almost a thousand visitors have passed through between 4pm and 8pm. “And all this came about because of a meeting over a beer with a few organisations keen to promote their products and help improve the area,” he says. “The working men’s club let us have the car park for nothing, so all it cost was a £50 licence from the council.”

Co-operatives are well represented among the dozen or so stallholders, including one selling everything from eco-friendly washing powder to organic cous-cous. “The principle behind it,” says stallholder Nancy Langfeldt, “is to combine our purchasing power to make more sustainable food available from local sources.” And that’s not a bad definition of the principle behind community markets as whole.

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