London is a town of many centres. I’m not talking about the West End, but the local high streets and shopping centres of Greater London, which mirror many others up and down the country. Each is slightly different, but the general pattern isn’t a very pretty one.
I’ve already mentioned one of the wonders of Wandsworth, the ultimate slow fashion experience that is WG Child and Sons, the tailors. At the other extreme, The Southside Centre is a monumental edifice to soulless consumerism and social dysfunction. Walking down gloomily lit corridors, dotted with the odd bit of municipal brickwork and the ubiquitous ‘caution, wet floor’ notices, is an altogether depressing experience. Half the shops are shut, or shuttered up – mainly the smaller, independent ones.
The amusement arcade ‘under new management’ welcomes you to ‘the friendliest place in town,’ where those on benefits keep warm, whilst frittering away the few pence they can ill afford to lose. Near one entrance there’s a shabby looking bazaar style grocery store, with fruit and vegetables arranged haphazardly on the walkway.
There’s an awful lot of empty space, occasionally interrupted by cheap looking stalls, where market style street traders ply their wares to small groups of weary looking passers-by. Here you can exchange your wedding ring for cash – or have your eyebrows threaded, reality TV style – to entertain an audience of uninvited guests. Except today these booths are closed.
Elsewhere, large store fronts bear the logos of familiar discount chains: Primark, Poundland, Superdrug, TK Maxx and Argos. Among the less familiar are the appropriately named Risky – and Shoe Zone, whose bland offering resembles the surplus stock of a former communist state department store.
The large Waitrose store at one end of the complex is conveniently attached to the multi-storey car park, so visitors have no need to venture beyond its doors. More discerning residents will probably choose to avoid this, even if it’s their nearest branch. The centre is given up to the unemployed, in need of somewhere to spend their empty time; older people with bus passes, wanting to use a service – a mobile phone shop, the opticians perhaps – and school or college kids buying fast food, or going to the cinema.
Beyond The Southside more fronts are boarded up and professional charity shops appear to be the only new arrivals. We used to be known as a nation of shopkeepers, but I’m not quite sure what we’ve become…
It was worse when it was the Arndale: all the above plus stained brutalist concrete. But the place went to the dogs even before that monstrosity was built. The under-employed frittering away the few pence they can ill afford to lose? There used to be a greyhound stadium here.
Last time I looked the Ram Brewery over the road – a lovely building – was being redeveloped for more shopping. I wish we could occasionally find something else to do with these places.
Thought prodding Susan, the expression ‘the mean streets’ will do nicely. Desultory, windswept, dreary, Rauschenberg would have whipped out his easel.
Not just in the outer suburbs and small towns, visit Edinburgh and weep, they have managed the look, whilst the shops remain open, The Royal Mile has the appeal of nineteen seventies Soweto. New shop building in Princess street is strictly from the four walls and a lid school of design. This while other European cities are employing architects of the stature of Renzo Piano in their shop building activities.
The pragmatic approach would be reverting to residential, which many shops would have originally been, that would presuppose a pragmatic local administration and Gaddafi is as sane as you and I
Agreed that Princes Street is gone (although the Council architectural plan for its future consists of putting the old buildings back when opportunity arises) but isn’t that just a tad harsh on the city as a whole, Malty? Bruntsfield, Broughton Street and Raeburn Place are a small-shopper’s paradise, and even the Grassmarket and West End contain discoveries waiting to be made. And Canongate, still part of the Royal Mile, has good pubs (better indeed than they were even 3 years ago), print shops, publishers and a poetry library.
The Ram Brewery is a huge loss. It was my misfortune to grow up in Bedford, and every reminder that Youngs is now brewed there makes me wince anew. And Susan, you’re right about THAT shopping centre in every respect and detail, although I’d describe it as one of the worst in the country rather than typical. And that, even after a recession which put so many shutters up.
Give you Brunsfield, Broughton St and the Grassmarket James, even George St, though James Thin’s name is gone and you have to carve a path through the suits. However, driving in as we do from Melrose via Fort Kinnaird past Meadowbank and London Rd requires eyes tight shut.
Regarding the pubs, hmmmm.
Ooph, yes: Fort Kinnaird. You can pretty much have George Street as well, although architecturally it’s more of a survivor than poor Princes Street.
Feel free to disagree with me about pubs: none of Edinburgh’s are run by Charles Wells, so in that, they are all good.
I remember the Arndale Centre, and The Brewery Tap where we’d go of a lunchtime for a ”Ram & Special”. To the Arndale for Dunkin’ Donuts for elevenses. We were students.
Going around the brewery one day was an experience that could have turned you against drinking beer if you hadn’t already got a taste for it. We were told that each worker there was entitled to drink a quart a day, of whatever they fancied, from the ”tap”, including each one of the shire horses still being used for local deliveries – talk about drink driving!
Actually, I think it proves we still are a nation of shopkeepers – and, obviously, by association, shoppers. I think the problem is we’ve been at it for so many generations, we’ve forgotten how and why we do it.
How come you know so much about Wandsworth, Gaw? Surely the greyhound fanciers shopped at the local butchers, bakers and candlestick makers? Arndales developed quite a reputation. I recall a very nasty one in Luton – and there was another in Coventry, that looked a bit like a souk back in the early 1980s (later bombed by the IRA). Growing up in Hatfield, the shopping experience was grim, apart from the characterless Galleria (not around in my day) the town centre should have been bombed years ago. Anyway, at least now we can opt out and shop online…
I haven’t been to Edinburgh for quite a while, Malty, but I’ve always thought it a fine city. I loved the Howtowdie? Restaurant, where the patron played the fiddle. Wandsworth does Soweto too – there’s residential above the Southside.
Did I read that correctly, Ian? Beer drinking shire horses? Sadly, they were put out to pasture before the brewery moved away, but they did cause terrible traffic jams and make a dreadful mess on the roads (probably the Special).
As for the ‘how’ we do it, Ian, I think these days it’s mainly ‘on the internet’. Why? Shop overheads (especially rent and rates) are too expensive unless you’re a multiple/high volume retailer.
Yes, it was mixed in with the horse’s mashed oats and feed in a nose bag.
I really mean the deeper how and why. I was in the Organic Shop today, looking at hemp shirts from a hemp and bamboo textile company. The label explained the fabric was made from cannabis hemp. I wondered, when ironing it, if you could get a bit high. I’ll never know, it wasn’t my colour.
I was also in our local independent electrical shop. You have to share the small floor space with a collection of vacuum cleaners, every shape and model you can imagine. I think most are part-exchanges or in for repair. Behind the man behind the counter are rows upon rows of light bulbs – this time we wanted one for our fridge. All the times I’ve been in for a bulb he’s never disappointed me.
Afterwards, a few shops down from him, the RSPCA, where I found Frankenstein for 50p.
Why is it all those horrid shopping centres are/were called Arndale? I was in Coventry today and from the lofty heights of the building I was in, I was admiring the optimistic futurism of the 1960’s – where it was considered the very height of cool to put a carpark on the building’s roof. I wonder why we don’t think that’s worth doing anymore?
What we’ve become, surely, is a nation of families where both parents work full-time and rely on ringroad hypermarkets open all hours? Boutiquey streets are still ok and recreational-shopping city centre redevelopments (liverpool one, cabot circus in Bristol) are ok, but the functional High Street is history.
I’m wondering if anyone in their 40s or above might underestimate just how long this has been going on. Before the 70s were out, my family were nursing the Renault 12 out to a Sainsburys in a different town because – because we’d moved into shopless suburbs, because the drive into the centre of our own town was a crawl on a Saturday, because the out of town store was ALREADY considerably bigger than the 1960s branch we’d once frequented. By then, we were even driving to collect fish and chips. Queues in supermarkets before barcode scanners were invented and everything had to be entered into the till by hand..
By 1980, central Bedford was little more than a giant roofless shopping centre with no car park and bad pavements. All chainstores. Remember Beehive?
Milton Keynes Shopping Centre, which killed the old Bedford town centre (mercifully, in some respects) was opened 32 years ago and is now Grade II listed!
32 years before THAT, India became independent. Staggering to think, really.
I agree Ian, there are still some quirky little shops, run by people who love what they do, but these are very much the exception – unless they’re charity shops, which benefit from all manner of financial incentives as well as voluntary staff.
Worm, I suppose roof top car parks are antiquated now, what with the sophisticated new stacking systems that are being introduced. Why do rooftop car parks remind me of Starsky and Hutch?
Brit, the recreational thing is really big. Stores have to create entertainment to attract shoppers. Shopping is becoming much more linked to social activities with talks, tastings, fashion shows, book signings etc Otherwise, over-burdened shoppers may as well buy online. A friend told me the Chippendales were wandering around Selfridges the other day whilst she was doing her food shopping. Shame, I missed that…
The Chippendales must be in wheelchairs by now. Wouldn’t John Lewis be a bit more their style?
Favourite shopping areas of yesteryear…..The Pantiles in the sixties, classy. Princes St, late fifties, Cadbury’s Chocolate hoose a delight. The entire centre of Chamonix, St Gervais, Argentière, and Annecy, ’tis a pity the are French.
Back to Blighty, Lewisham high St, 1965ish, the Catford end, Chiesmans department store, straight from Are You Being Served, honestly. Kings road circa ’65 – ’66, ditto Kensington high street, the epitome of cool, cool man, the bar of the Kensington Palace Hotel an education, whilst the ladies shopped.
For James…proper pubs of yesteryear…..Dean Street’s Crown Posada, even today life enhancing. The Bird in the Bush, Elsdon, British beer at it’s finest. The Dyke Neuk, all Northumbrian life was there. The Bull, Staplehurst, absolutely the Weald, complete with the best set of carrot crunchers, this side of Bradford Abbas, I mean man, horse and buggy in the car park. That Watneys pub at St Martins post office, just off Trafalgar square, dripping with fifties cockneyesque. Not really a pub, more the bar of a hotel, Hawkhurst’s The Royal Oak, every weekend during term full of Benenden parents, practising baying like donkey toffs, Anne Windsor drinking shandy in a dark corner. Mein host Bennie Jenkins doing his Faulty Towers Major act, years before the show was aired.
And finally, a dark winters night, driving rain, the ghosts of Legionnaires tramping the military road outside, huge open fire, the smell of wood smoke, drying cyclist’s socks, the taste of well kept Exhibition. Friday night, no more work until Monday…it must be the Twice Brewed on Hadrian’s wall, before it was resurrected by them. The equivalent of swimming through a vat of twenty five year old Macallan, with open mouth.
Or, maybe, just maybe, Walter Bonatti’s pub in Chamonix, listen first hand to how that pillar on Les Drus was conquered.
How on earth did Susan’s excellent post on the demise of corner shop Britain end up with wrinklies discussing boozers??
Malty, I’m found of a number of pubs but this one is the most remarkable I know:
http://gawragbag.blogspot.com/2009/06/crimson-cat.html
It feels like something of a miracle that you can still find places like this – so catch it if you can.
Enough material for my next post on pubs, thanks malty and Gaw (where is Ampney St Peter?) James, perhaps my friend forgot her glasses, or it was a younger/cosmetically enhanced version of the Chippendales she saw baring their chests by the cheese counter. MK Grade II listed, whatever next? Catford’s ‘iconic’ black cat? (if it’s still there..)
Near Cirencester.
Susan, I do hope it WAS the original Chippendales: apart from anything else, it’s the done thing these days to keep rocking til the end. It’s always been an ambition of mine, to live to see the Stones sing “Can’t Get No Satisfaction” and mean it..
Likewise the Chips will actually have acquired charm when, stripping behind their zimmers, they look less like overinflated Greek statues and more like “characters” from the hideous old pubs Malty and Gaw have been listing.