Well then did this event disappoint! This Night Market was the second time that Unity had hosted one of these events, the first coming I believe before the Pandemic hit. There were perhaps 13-15 stalls upstairs in Unity 2 while the Performance space Unity 1 was used jointly as another place to serve food, some of it hot and to be used as a space for a group of Christmas Musicians to perform from. I didn’t hear these sing personally, but they seemed to play well and kept some of the audience happy I am sure. The Bar had three stalls down the side of it and the Bar was serving festive drinks such as Orange or Apple Mulled Wine.
The quality of the items available for sale was probably really high, but with price-tags for some of the clothing topping over £200+ and small bottles of gin, rum and vodka costing £30 a pop, you could tell the focus of this Market was not quite so Christmas (even though it was part of Unity’s Christmas Schedule of events), and more so home-made, bespoke artisan goods. All from very talented people I am sure, but some of the stalls staffing left something to be desired. The guy on the Gin stall was looking at people, making eye contact, but that didn’t change when you approached his stall, he said nothing. Then there was a local author who had his own self-published book on sale. He was sat behind his table, arms folded, legs crossed.. Completely unapproachable, or at least giving off those kind of body vibes.
People bought a few different things, an artwork print, some jar’s of jam, some dates, some bookmarks and we donated some money to the bar in exchange for some Mulled Wine… We stayed a while in the end but only really to plan our relocation to the big Christmas Market outside the St. George’s hall… unfortunately, it closes at 9:30pm, so we couldn’t make it down to that in time tonight. By reports we heard, it was too busy anyway. So we will have to arrange to go in a daytime sometime before Christmas. – Ah shucks, another night out!
All in all, very disappointed at what was on offer at this Night Market, and will know now not to bother attending any others. Thankfully, at least… it was Free. The night however was not a waste of time. A night spent with friends and family. A good time was had, I think!
