IT IS MORE than 30 years since I stood on Cheapside in Barnsley and waved my flag at the Queen. I rarely walk past without thinking of that sunny day when the Metropolitan Centre was so shiny and new that Her Majesty came to see it.

These days it is a lump of dirt-streaked concrete, a monument to the town’s previous attempt at redevelopment. Soon it will be replaced by a £235 million scheme of shops, including a Debenhams, 100 apartments, a multiscreen cinema and a 1,200space car park. Cheapside is the cornerstone of the Metropolitan Borough Council’s Remaking Barnsley project to build a “21st-century market town”. The Metropolitan Centre has a WH Smith, HMV, Holland and Barrett, Greenwood’s gentlemen’s outfitters, phone shops and an Early Learning Centre knee-deep in toddlers on Saturdays. This town definitely needs another toyshop. And a proper bookshop.

Across Cheapside is Richard Share, a jeweller’s that attracts queues on payday. The Body Shop seems too right-on for the pasty-munch-ers trudging past. Barnsley has a lot of them. The town ranks high on every social deprivation scale: obesity, smoking, teenage pregnancy, drugs. Tackling the pasty-munchers is more of a challenge than Remaking Barnsley itself.

Littlewoods closed last year. No new tenant has come in because the building is on the demolition list. Rumours swept the town that there was going to be a new Primark on the site — the biggest in the North, some said. But the store remains in the spectacularly ugly Alhambra mall and it never has enough stock above size 12. This is crazy, given us buxom local lasses. The manager says he can sell only what he is sent. Not the kind of attitude to encourage people to come into town instead of heading for Meadowhall, the gigantic shopping mall on the M1 near Sheffield, 20 minutes’ drive away.

“I try to offer something just that little bit different from what you get at Meadowhall,” says Jill Brown, who opened Booti, a shoe shop on Market Street, last year. Booti is part of an exciting new wave of Barnsley retail that reflects the upfront glamour of the town’s nightlife. If you want gorgeous underwear, corsets to go clubbing or Paul Smith shirts, you’ll find them.

Michelle Atkinson moved from London to open Aura, a beauty spa in the Thomas Whitworth Forum, a former linen warehouse that houses a bar, restaurant, shops and salons. “I read some research which said that Barnsley women spend more on personal maintenance that anywhere else in Britain,” she says, “so that’s why we came.”

Market Street is known as “charity shop alley”. But as well as Booti there is a juice bar, and a mother and baby café coming soon, so it looks as if things are looking up. Barnsley is certainly changing. For too long it has been known only as that quaint northern town with its one designer shop. Pollyanna remains a fashion institution, selling Prada, Issey Miyake and Jil Sander on Market Hill.

The market has been an institution for centuries. Like my mother and grandmothers, I wouldn’t go anywhere else for fresh fish, meat, fruit and veg. The rows of empty market stalls are a sad indictment, however, of changing shopping habits. They’re going to be replaced by an ultra-modern boulevard of stalls, with a glass roof. Expecting all those lost shoppers to return is a huge gamble, as is persuading people to keep coming into town when the three-year rebuild starts in 2008. “We recognise it will be a major challenge getting across to people that Barnsley is open for business, and not just a building site,” says David Kennedy, the council’s executive director for development.

There are apartments being built, but as yet no great buzz about living in them. Within ten minutes’ walk of Cheapside however, Victorian and Edwardian houses are being colonised by a breed new to Barnsley — the young, urban, upwardly mobile, professional middle class. “When we were looking, I’d see all these houses and go, ‘Wow, look at that for that price’,” says one friend, who moved from North Yorkshire with her Barnsley-born husband and two children. “But someone would say, ‘You can’t live there, it’s really rough’, and I’d be told that the road was notorious for druggies.”

In the Huddersfield Road area, a popular colony, several grand villas have been snapped up by developers, demolished and replaced by flats. Off this road and nearby Dodworth Road, Persimmon and Strata are building new estates.

Another up-coming enclave is Park Grove, where the Simon Blyth agency is selling a four-bedroom, bay-fronted Victorian terrace house for £164,950. Cheap, eh? In the past three years prices in the sought-after villages to the west of Barnsley have risen faster than prices in the town centre. The overall average price of a house in the town centre is only £101,096, a detached house is £175,050, according to the Land Registry. To the west, there are plenty of £500,000 plus properties with land.

David Robinson, of Simon Blyth, says: “The thing about regeneration is it’s not a quick fix.” The thing about Barnsley is that it needs a hefty dose of self-belief. Nothing better for that than a new pair of shoes. Bought in Barnsley, of course.

Simon Blyth estate agents: 01226 762400

FACT FILE

Would I like it? There are 218,000 people in Barnsley, so for company you’re spoilt for choice. King Coal has given way to creative industries such as web design; 68 per cent of the borough is green belt, 9 per cent is national park.

What is there to do? Rocking music scene, loads of pubs and bars; and new restaurants, such as upmarket Chilli on Market Street, and Latino’s in Lucorum.

Any celebs? You might spot the cricketer Darren Gough, folk singer Kate Rusby, or an Arctic Monkey (ex-Barnsley College).

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