Economy
North Petherton used to be a market town, with the right to hold a market having been granted in 1318, along with the right to an annual fair.
In the past the town hosted a Starkey Knight and Ford brewery on Fore Street (demolished in the late 1960s), several maltings, a light engineering works (Trig Engineering, since moved to the Huntworth Business Park adjacent to the nearby Junction 24 of the M5 motorway), and in earlier times at least 7 watermills.
Basket making and the manufacture of associated products including wicker furniture, was also a significant industry, at one time employing over 100 people in small factories and homes, until its decline in the second half of the 20th century. The products were distributed nationally via the railway station at Bridgwater. Nearby King's Cliff formerly provided a source of building stone for the town dating from at least Medieval times. The production of cloth and leather goods also used to take place in the town, the former being commemorated in the name of the road known as Dyer's Green.
The extensive cider orchards that used to surround much of the town in the 19th century had largely disappeared by the end of the 20th, by which time local employment was largely restricted to service businesses and farming. Folly Foot fishery is based on a lake which is stocked with Koi, Mirror, Common and Ghost Carp.
A new £100 m Regional Agricultural Business Centre, including an extensive Cattle Market and Dairy opened just beyond the outskirts of the town in 2007, following construction which began in 2006. This replaced the cattle markets in both Taunton and Bridgwater.
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Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)