Southport’s festive celebrations got under way this weekend as the Big Onion community hub opened its doors for a Christmas market, its first major event since moving into town.
The market ran alongside the Christmas lights switch-on on Lord Street, drawing strong crowds throughout the day.
The Big Onion offers business advice to local traders and provides affordable retail space within its new premises in Southport’s Town Hall Gardens. It is owned by Merseyside Expanding Horizons, which already has a Big Onion hub operating in Bootle, with a third site planned for Prescott.
Chris Lewis, who organised the market, said the timing was perfect. He said: “This is an annual event that happens on Lord Street, the Light Spectacular,” he said. “This is the first time we’ve been here, because the Big Onion project has literally only just moved into Southport.”
He added: “We have a big hub in Bootle, where we incubate start-up businesses, we run the council contract for business start-up, and we run a series of community employment support and skills programmes.”
Mr Lewis explained that one of the goals of the new hub is to give small and socially-minded businesses a place to grow. “One of the big issues for social enterprises and small businesses, start-up businesses alike, is finding access to affordable premises,” he said. “So the space will be available seven days a week… at a very low rate.”
Among the sellers on the day was Emmy Porter, who both works with the Big Onion and ran her own stall.
“I’ve been involved in the setting up of The Onion from when the kind of idea was just an idea,” she said. “A lot of the events that we do are free and they’re for the benefit of the public.”
Porter said the response had been “really, really successful”, adding: “We’ve had really good footfall… busiest day of the year. It’s amazing.”
Lewis said events like this are especially important following last year’s knife attack.
“I think what we want to try to do, whilst we obviously want to remember what happened there, we want to bring the community together,” he said. “It might be quite healing as well.”
Watch The Big Onion Christmas market celebrations here: The Big Onion Market Event
