The family business which has been built up over 35 years has closed with immediate effect. A long-running and costly legal dispute with neighbour Pamela Mills, which ended up in the High Court, over the track used to access the nursery and the more recently added popular tearooms, built in 2016-17, has been blamed for the demise of the business which the late Philip Partridge, who died in 2018, had built up with wife Lyn, daughter Esther and son Chris. In a post on their Facebook page, the Partridges said it was with great sadness and disappointment that both the nursery and tearooms were closing and they added: We have found ourselves in the position where we can no longer afford the insurmountable costs involved to continue
But having revitalised the town’s pig and sheep market, the business was hit hard by successive disease outbreaks in the livestock industry.
The 14-week closure from August 2000 due to East Anglia’s classical swine fever outbreaks, followed by the world’s worst epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease in February 2001, were a knock-out blow.
When markets could finally re-open in 2002, the cost of compliance with new stringent biosecurity rules was prohibitive for smaller specialist centres.
In that first week of February, more than 100 years of pig and sheep sales at Aylsham came to an end. It joined a long list of lost auction markets across Norfolk.