Bathgate Market Organiser Lucy Lawson Wins Prestigious Churchill Fellowship

A West Lothian woman who built one of the area’s most beloved community markets from the ground up has been awarded one of the UK’s most prestigious honours, the Churchill Fellowship, which will now take her work to an international stage.

Lucy Lawson, the organiser behind Bathgate Market and Car Boot Sale, has been named a 2026 Churchill Fellow, a recognition that celebrates individuals doing outstanding grassroots work in their communities and gives them the resources to develop their ideas further by learning from projects abroad.

The fellowship is no small deal. Churchill Fellows are selected from hundreds of applicants across the UK, and winners receive funding to travel internationally and bring back fresh ideas that can strengthen their work at home. For Lucy, that means taking everything she has built in Bathgate and using global inspiration to make it even better.

Bathgate Market has become a genuine fixture in the local community. What started as a simple market and car boot sale has grown into something far more meaningful for the people of West Lothian. It is the kind of place where neighbours bump into each other, where small traders get their first shot at selling, and where the town feels like an actual community rather than just a postcode.

Lucy has been the driving force behind all of it. Her work has focused not just on creating a place to buy and sell, but on building something that brings people together, supports local traders, and gives the area a sense of identity and pride.

The Churchill Fellowship will now allow her to take that vision beyond Scotland. She will travel to look at how similar community-led markets and grassroots initiatives operate in other countries, picking up ideas and approaches that she can bring back and apply in Bathgate and potentially across West Lothian more broadly.

It is exactly the kind of opportunity that community organisers rarely get. The day-to-day work of running a market, dealing with logistics, keeping traders happy, and making sure the public keeps showing up, leaves little room to step back and think about the bigger picture. The fellowship gives Lucy that breathing space, along with the backing to act on what she learns.

For Bathgate itself, the recognition feels significant. Community-led projects in smaller Scottish towns do not always get the spotlight they deserve, and Lucy’s fellowship puts a spotlight firmly on the kind of quiet, consistent work that keeps local areas ticking.

Local markets have seen something of a revival in recent years across Scotland, with communities increasingly looking for ways to shop locally, reduce waste, and support independent sellers rather than big retailers. Car boot sales in particular have had a resurgence, driven partly by a growing interest in second-hand goods and sustainability, and partly by the simple appeal of a good rummage on a weekend morning.

Lucy’s market has tapped into all of that, while also keeping its feet firmly on the ground as a community space first and a commercial venture second. That balance is harder to strike than it sounds, and it is clearly what caught the attention of the Churchill Fellowship selectors.

The 2026 fellowship will see Lucy join a network of fellows from across a huge range of fields, from healthcare to education to the arts. The programme has been running for decades and has a strong track record of turning grassroots passion into lasting change.

For now, Bathgate Market continues to do what it does best, giving West Lothian a place to gather, trade, and connect. And when Lucy returns from her fellowship travels, the hope is that it will do all of that even better.