Another shop has closed in Camden High Street. This time a butcher. This is not as serious a loss for me as the hardware store which closed a year ago. It had been the equal in quality and range to the John Lewis basement and had the advantage that help was always on hand from the Indian family who were finally defeated by the rates.
Across the road, and belonging to another branch of the same family, was an unusually well-stocked and well-organised stationer’s. It has gone too.
There will soon be nothing left among the plethora of cafes but the banks, the discount stores and the Money Shops. Apart, of course, from the larger chains which we all use and which have helped cause the havoc.
© Secret Artist NW5
As for Kentish Town High Street . . . If only I had gone to Abba Electrics for all the fridges and washing machines that I have bought over the last fifty-odd years, instead of heading for the West End. The washing machine that I bought there the other day is working perfectly, and it was a lot more fun discussing it and arranging its delivery with the owner of the shop and his helpers than with the polite and well-trained staff at John Lewis.
So, too, did I enjoy buying a pair of trainers at the little sports shop just beyond the point where the High Street forks and becomes Fortess Road. Here we had a long talk about how small businesses suffer from restricted parking and also about the similarities between his race (Greek) and mine (Jewish) when it came to old-fashioned ‘family values’.
© Secret Artist NW5
It is not that the staff in Lidl or M&S are any less human but they can’t stop and chat, though the other day, when I dropped something and the film-star handsome black store walker apologised for failing to pick it up for me, this led us into a fascinating conversation about football injuries. He was even less able to bend down than I was.
In terms more general than shopping, I ‘went local’ years ago, helping to stop a flyover being built where all we needed was a zebra crossing and preventing the council from pulling down our street. I was not among those who saved Kentish Town West Station, nor those who fought off the Council (for Council, read Developer) from encroaching on our little local park, but I do remain interested and am a conscientious reader of our campaigning local paper.
© Secret Artist NW5
Who, oddly enough, failed to support me when my book was published. Of the three review copies we sent them, only one was even acknowledged, yet they have published every letter I have ever sent them (except one offering to help a particularly unsavoury business mogul pack his bags when it was reported he threatened to take his business elsewhere). It was disappointing, too, that my local bookshop, which I have supported since it opened some forty years ago, didn’t display my book for even a day.
Perhaps it is not surprising that one is made to feel more welcome by the small shopkeepers, who are struggling to survive, than by the thriving literati.
Many thanks to Secret Artist NW5 for use of the illustrations above, see more at www.secretartistnw5.com.