Popular family retire Melton fruit and veg stall after 39 years

It was started up by Mark Shaw four decades ago and he was joined soon after by parents Pete and Mary with generations of the same local families buying their produce over the years.

The family also had a shop - P&M Fruiterers - in Melton, in Nottingham Street and Park Road, and a florists in the town centre.

They won’t miss the early morning preparations for the street market stall and standing for hours on end, often in very cold weather, but they will miss the people.

As he prepared to wrap up his final pieces of fruit and veg on Saturday, Pete, who is 75, told the Melton Times: “Doing this job is company, it’s not just a job.

“Each customer is a friend.

“We’ve had people come to the stall as babies, and also when they’ve grown up and they still come now with their families.

“We have had a lot of people come up to us today to thank us and say goodbye and we will miss them.”

Mark (55) got into the market game first when he was invited by his neighbour to help out on a stall back in the 1970s.

He then got a job on the wholesale market in Leicester before starting up his own stall on the Melton street market, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, in 1981.

Mark recalled: “We must have had 40 people helping out on the stall over the years.

“In the early days, Nottingham Street was still a road so the stalls were all set up on the footpaths and people had to shuffle along because there wasn’t a lot of space.”

He has also run a stall at Newark market and juggled work for many years with being a retained Melton firefighter.

On many occasions he would be serving a customer when his bleeper went off alerting him to an incident, which he then had to respond to with a quick dash to the fire station.

There are many things the family has enjoyed about being market traders, such as working out in the fresh air and meeting people.

But the job has been demanding for them with the unusual hours and the sometimes inclement weather conditions.

“Our day on the stall has started at 3am with a trip to the wholesale market at Leicester,” Mark explained.

“We would get back here to Melton for 6.30am to set up the stall and then work until 4.

“I’ve not been in great health and I also suffer from a bad back so it is time for me to finish now.”

Mum Mary, 75, added: “It is a very, very sad day today because we have made so many good friends over the years.”