The Marlborough Summer School has been going for 50 years, attracting thousands of people to the town through the holidays and sustaining the businesses of the high street, with only a brief break during the Covid years - and next year.
The College has announced it is suspending operations in 2025. As the bursar explained when I visited this week, this is for a mixture of internal (some staff changes) and external reasons, of which the most significant are the impending increase in Employer NICs and the VAT on private school fees. It’s still not clear whether the ‘education’ the Summer School provides (i.e. courses for children and adults of all ages) will attract VAT; but there’s no time to find out, as planning starts now and if VAT is levied it makes the whole thing unviable.
So I very much hope that they find a way to resume in 2026; and that we Conservatives get back into power in 2029 and undo the damage Labour have done to this and other businesses. I met another man yesterday (Sunday) who will have to either die quickly, or live in the knowledge his children will have to sell the farm he, his father and grandfather spent their lives building up, all to pay Inheritance Tax that the very rich will avoid.
Pewsey is looking up. Made in the Pewsey Vale, a new artists’ exhibition space, has opened opposite the dentists, just along from the Moonrakers: a spot of brightness in these dank December days. Do pop in to see their revolving exhibitions, and stock up on affordable art for 2025 (website here). And over the road, where clock repairers Time Restored used to be - a sad loss - another green shoot has sprouted: Garden Kitchen, selling delicious posh food over the deli counter or at the tables. We had our team lunch there on Friday and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
Whatley & Hiscock, agricultural engineers, made gun carriages in Pewsey in World War 1 and shell cases in World War 2. When they were clearing out the old factory, on the river opposite the turn to the Coop, the bomb squad had to be called to deal with the unspent munitions. The family gave the old factory to the parish, and now it is a heritage centre and accredited museum for the Pewsey Vale, run by trustees chaired by Paul Cowan, who showed me round. It is a trove of artefacts from the age of steam, but also a shrine to the human beings - from the Hosiers, still farming hereabouts, to the famous J.H. Maggs, first chairman of United Dairies - who made Wiltshire the world centre of what we now call ‘agritech’, in an age when farmers mattered to the government.
