Ashby's barbers are getting ready for a surge in demand from people wanting a haircut next month.

Barbers' shops could be opening up again on July 4 - and that is likely to lead to queues forming at a time when social distancing measures are in place.

And that raises the question of how to deal with the numbers of people turning up.

Appointments systems could be used along with socially distanced queues.

But after months of not being able to cut hair, barbers are now preparing to be inundated.

And it is clear that even something as routine as getting a haircut is not going to be straightforward in what we now call 'the new normal'.

But for the barbers themselves, they will have to careful plan their re-opeing in terms of both numbers of customers and safety concerns.

Ashby Nub News spoke to Arthur's of Ashby on Market Street and The Short Cut in Mill Lane Mews to find out how they plan to cope.

Tommy Burdett, the owner of Arthur's, said: "We're getting tens of messages daily, it's ridiculous, people are obviously fed up and waiting a haircut now.

"It's pretty busy, everyone's trying to get in for when we re-open and I think the way we're going to go is appointments - certainly for the first couple of weeks.

"And that's purely to manage the amount of people coming in.

"On some busy Saturdays we can have 20-25 customers waiting. That's not viable with social distancing, it's definitely something we'll have to address.

"It gives people more flexibility as well, they can some down for a certain time slot rather than having to wait for a couple of hours.

"The other thing is that we want to help social distancing - we don't want to have queues out on the street where other people are walking up and down.

"We'll tell people to turn up promptly. But until the Government release definite guidelines, it's difficult to say exactly what's going to happen with regards to PPE and things like that."

Mark Gilliver, owner of The Short Cut, is targeting a re-opening next month and says he has ideas in place but it depends on what the eventual Government guidelines are.

He said: "There's a bit of cat and mouse and guesswork at the moment.

"Where our shop is, we have an entrance on the Mews and also one that goes into a courtyard.

"And the last two days before lockdown, we had to shut the waiting room down and had people queuing outside at a safe distance.

"It worked really well, we're really in favour of it. But we have the courtyard and what was the back entrance could now be the front entrance with people queuing in the courtyard - we've spoken to the council about this.

"Then people wouldn't be in contact with any passing trade."

Tommy added that he plans protect his staff as much as possible when the shop re-opens.

He said: "I've spoken to the lads here and they're all going to need to wear masks as you'll be in such close proximity.

"There's a couple of our lads who have young children at home and the last thing you want is to contract it then take it home.

"We'll protect ourselves as much as possible.

"But we have gowns that are going on people and they're normally washed daily, there are scissors to think off.

"The beauty of our industry is that we're geared up to hygienic as possible.

""We'll have been open two years next month, but this is all new for us though, you have to rethink everything."

Mark says he has been weighing up the best way to deal with the amount of people he is expecting through the door.

The Short Cut owner added: "We've thought about maybe introducing a ticket system with an estimated time on it.

"Then you might only have two or three people queuing, then two or three stylists working off a coloured ticket system.

"There's also a barber from Worcester who hopes to have an app up and running which gives you a notification when your appointment is approaching.

"The difficult bit is an appointment system. It's guarantees of whether people will come back, you're guessing times. I think appointments would be the last thing we'd want to do.

"Trying to convert a walk in to appointments is tough. We could also have a situation where there was a maximum queue, we wouldn't want 20-30 people, maybe 10 maximum.

"We should know more from the Government on around June 20, for now it's guesswork.

"But we've done a lot of work in the shop to make it safe. All brushes, gowns and combs will be sanitised.

"We can't do or say any more for the moment."