AS A TRADER in the town centre for the last 30 years ! I have witnessed many ebbs and flows of the tide throughout the town .

Sadly way too many ebbs.

An article on Monday, July 11, certainly brought a smile to my face as, yes, we are slowly turning the tide and bucking the seaside town malaise.

The town centre certainly is starting to bloom and hopefully the long hoped for blossoming can now be looked forward to .

Certainly we have a long way to go to relive the glory days, if they ever existed. But speaking as a shop manager in the lower end of St Mary Street is is nice to see a thriving business community developing .

From our shopfront we can see no empty shops, just a developing cafe-type culture with traditional cafes, pubs and gift shops complimented by service shops all seemingly busy and happy. This is not just confined to one area.

A quick wander down St Alban Street will confirm the same.

This change has not come about due to the powers that be, in fact any trader in town will tell you it’s in spite of the endeavours, or lack of them, from the council etc that has forced us to be proactive and seek our own solutions.

We still have serious problems within the town markedly within the young people and the lack of suitable employment. The drift towards service industries as opposed to traditional manufacturing etc has hit the whole country but we in a busy holiday town have seen a predominance of cheap part time seasonal work become the only available option The local college seems at last to have grasped the problems and it is heartwarming to see the way some departments have moved with the times so well; Stand up the catering and the construction departments.

They have both understood the employment needs locally and are winning the battle .

Tourism events like last weekend’s food festival are a fantastic draw and it is up to the rest of the town traders to capitalise on the opportunities they present but it would be foolish to let a dependency on such days take over.

The town needs to come together as one.

We need the myriad of local business organisations, councils and groups to come together to put self interest aside We have to understand a local council where the staff are more concerned with job security than building a better borough will never take responsibility as most believe it should.

Now is the time for us as a business community to develop a Pride in Weymouth campaign so lets not trample all over the green shoots of recovery in our rush to pull up a deck chair and relax.

We still have a lot of work to do to leave a town that the population can love as much as our visitors do.

Shaun Hennessy

St Mary Street

Weymouth