Fields ofSidmouth

A department store has traded from Market Place since 1809, beginning as a draper's, and it keeps the name of the Fields — the family that ran it until 1952. After a spell of decline it was bought by new owners in 1978, and in 2015 it joined the Goulds family's small independent group, which also keeps Goulds of Dorchester and a garden centre — an arrangement that leaves it what it has almost always been: a proper small-town department store in independent family hands. Two centuries of continuous trade from the same site is the rarest kind of high-street survival. Open seven days.