Look Local: Helping sightseers at peak times

About 16 million visitors a year spend more than £1 billion in the market towns in and around the UK’s largest national park. There are market towns on the borders of the parkland, such as Penrith, Carlisle or Kendal that are host to groups of high street practices. However, bleary-eyed hikers stumbling on the small towns and villages within the national park can find four opticians serving the sporadic communities that live across 885 square miles of mountainous pastoral arcadia.

Director and optometrist at Ambleside Opticians, Uzma Ahmed, says: ‘The ratio between NHS to private eye exams in our practice is 3:1. The settled community present a lot of age-related eye conditions.’