The Farmers’ Market morning
Stand on Village Square just after nine on a Saturday morning and the place announces itself in small, practical ways. The 11 bus turns the corner of Vicarage Road and the High Street, slow enough for passengers to look down at the stalls taking shape below the church spire. There is bread on one table already, still carrying the warm, yeasty smell of an early bake. The Farmers’ Market committee has been there since seven with a clipboard, a roll of tape and the kind of patience that only comes from doing the same job in all weathers, while a cheesemonger adjusts a sign with both hands.
A committee decision that stuck
The Farmers’ Market began as a simple committee decision. By early 2006, Kings Heath Business Association was five years into its work and the High Street needed something regular, something people could mark in the diary without checking a poster. The aim was to create a fixture that belonged to Kings Heath and returned often enough to become part of the rhythm of the place.
There was a practical reason too. Local producers needed a direct channel to customers, face to face and without much ceremony. Saturday shoppers needed a reason to make the trip to Kings Heath rather than drift elsewhere. For the High Street, it was a way of saying that this was a destination in its own right, not just a route south towards Alcester and Stratford.
The chosen spot was the corner of Vicarage Road and the High Street. It had the 11 bus swinging round it, the church with the spire above it and a steady passage of people moving between shops, pavements and crossings. At the time it was an unloved junction rather than the Village Square people recognise now. The Farmers’ Market launched there in May 2006 anyway.
How the Square became useful
In the years that followed, the Village Square took shape at that same intersection. KHBA did not build the Square; it was part of a wider environmental improvement project. The Association had, though, argued for years that Kings Heath needed a public space, somewhere useful and visible, a place where fairs, markets and community activity could happen without borrowing someone else's room.
So the Farmers’ Market and the Square moved in together. The stalls gave the new space a reason to be used. The new paving gave the Farmers’ Market a proper home. What might have been only a neater junction became a point of arrival, with tables laid out under bunting and shoppers moving between bread, cheese, plants, preserves and the rest of the High Street.
The invisible chain of small jobs
Keeping it there is not complicated in theory. It is twelve dates a year, on the first Saturday of the month, with 25+ stallholders trading from 9am to 2pm. In practice, it is a chain of small jobs that begin long before the first van arrives: permits checked, producers chased and confirmed, spaces planned, bunting found, questions answered, changes absorbed when the weather turns or a stallholder rings late.
That work is organised by a separate committee. It is voluntary work, much of it invisible, the sort that leaves no plaque and does not fit neatly into a photograph. Someone has to know where the clips are kept. Someone has to remember which corner catches the wind. Someone has to be there early enough for the Farmers’ Market to look settled by the time everyone else arrives.
What the High Street gets back
What it gives back is plain enough. Producers sell directly to the people who eat, plant, cook and carry things home. Surrounding traders get a Saturday with more reasons for people to linger. The High Street gets a low-key gathering point, the kind of ordinary public life that makes a shopping street feel like a place rather than a line of frontages.
The next Farmers’ Market is on Saturday 2 May, the first Saturday of May 2026, at the same corner of Vicarage Road and the High Street. The clipboard will be out early. The bread will arrive before most shutters are up. The 11 bus will still turn there.