Welcome to the first edition of the Brixham Fish Market blog
There’s a great deal of really interesting activities that happen every day down on the fish quay and these activities are invisible to most of us. Visitors and holidaymakers come to Brixham to enjoy their break in the sun, eat their fish and chips down on the harbour and then return to their homes without ever realising that we are the Number 1 fishing port in England based on gross fish sales, generating £40 million in 2017 and making a major contribution to the local economy.
Did you know that?
There are over 40 different species of fish landed here and we’re beginning to see changes in fish movements as sightings and landings of fish we don’t usually see in our surrounding waters become more common. In the last 3 months we’ve had 3 Blue Fin Tuna landed, the biggest of which was over 8 feet long. Unfortunately, as there is no quota for tuna in England, these impressive fish have to be taken away by the MMO for scientific research.
Brixham Trawler Agents Ltd (BTA) have played a major part in the growth of the fish market. The company manages the fish market and operates the fish auction on Monday to Friday where fish landed by the trawler skippers is sold to the fish buyers who compete at the daily shout auction for the best prices.
The quality of the fish landed in Brixham is held in high regard around the world and over 70% of our fish is exported as far afield as Italy and Spain, ending up on dinner plates in some top class restaurants.
BTA also supply fuel, ice and additional services to local and visiting fishing and commercial vessels that use the port of Brixham with over 16,000,000 litres of fuel sold throughout 2018.
The growth of fish sales coupled with the expansion in services offered by BTA has led us to the realisation that our current marketing activities and platforms are no longer serving our audience in the best way possible and this needs to change.
We are launching a new website.
We are completely re-designing our website to explain what we do and how we do it.
We are working to a very tight deadline and there’s a lot to do. We sent out our website specification document on 30 November and invited 4 local web development agencies to tender for the job. After going through all of their presentations we made our decision on the 13 December and awarded the contract to Whitespace Advertising. The new BTA website is planned to be launched at the end of February 2019 and will have a new web address of www.brixhamfishmarket.co.uk.
Our new Facebook page
We’ve just launched an official Brixham Fish Market Facebook page and we’ll be adding plenty of images and posts to highlight what we’re up to.
Please visit our page https://www.facebook.com/brixhamfishmarket/ and follow our progress.
The marketing team
The new web build is already underway and the design, as mentioned, is being carried out by Ashburton based design agency Whitespace Advertising with Brixham based photographer Rachael Ryder supplying the required images.
Rachael has already spent a very early morning down on the quayside and will be venturing out on a day boat this week so that we get some more fantastic images for the site.
BTA have retained local marketing consultant Andrew Leon Walker to project manage the web build along with delivering other identified marketing activities.
You can find out more about the team on their company websites below:
www.whitespaceadvertising.co.uk.
Over the course of the next few months we’ll keep you posted with our progress and tell the story of how we are moving from www.bxta.co.uk to www.brixhamfishmarket.co.uk.
Best regards
BTA