Chatsworth Road E5

Local high streets are vital, says Ashley Parsons

This is the tale of a street – the high street – and how I fell in love with it again, after nearly killing it dead.

Not deliberately, you understand. But for a while there I was lured away by the exotic attraction of the shiny new grocery cathedrals we came to call ‘supermarkets’. Each week I’d pay homage to the neatly stacked shelves, comparing one special offer with another, amazed that there was just so much stuff to buy, all in a place so big you needed trolleys to move around.

On my childhood initiation to this cult of glaring white lights and air conditioned aisles I remember staring in disbelief at the new Tesco in Bristol: it had a miraculous suspended roof – a suspended roof I tell you! – and seemed more like something out of a science fiction film than the west country.

That same store, tatty as it appears now, was just one example of a new generation of super-shops that, back in the 1980s, seemed to confidently confirm Britain’s ability to be modern, at a time when, quite frankly, things like Ceefax and the Sinclair C5 just weren’t cutting it as ‘the future’.

The supermarkets set aside huge areas of free parking, started opening on Sundays, then even 24 hours, and offered everything, shrink-wrapped, convenient, and apparently always getting cheaper regardless of inflation. (A trend that culminated in Asda recently selling whole chickens for just two quid.) The choice between this utopia and schlepping from one high street shop to another, paying higher prices as the carrier bags cut into your hands in the sheeting rain, was, as we would come to say in later, wiser years, a ‘no brainer’.

So why have I now returned, on foot, to using my local high street shops on a regular basis? Well, it’s a strange thing, but for starters – some of them actually know my name! And that’s a plus point I’ve never found forthcoming down the supermarket. Also, I’ve decided I’m not entirely comfortable with that whole chicken only costing two pounds. I’m a bit uncomfortable with the fact that, by weight, it’s (whisper it) cheaper than the dog food. And also, I’m just not sure it’s healthy for supermarket chains to be so enormous.

Take Tesco: it’s just posted an all-time record UK retail annual profit of £3.1 billion. Well done them and all that – I’m not knocking success. But this success has led to ‘Tesco Towns’ – places such as Inverness and Swansea – where Tesco takes more than 50% of all the grocery cash. Famously of humble east London origins, Tesco is now a ‘shop’ of such enormous proportions that, in 2008, it was named as the fourth largest retailer in the world (pause to let that fact sink in) and boasts a country sized revenue flow equivalent to Croatia or Vietnam.

Now, I agree, supermarkets are only shops that’ve done well. And I still shop there sometimes myself. I’m just asking, is it sensible for us all to be so reliant on four super-grocers for our food? Together, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons – the ‘Big Four’ – now corner around three quarters of the nation’s food retail. And that means they heavily influence the very way our country looks and feels.

Consider the sad case of British apples. During the last forty years we’ve lost around 90,000 acres of our world renowned apple orchards – that’s two thirds of the national acreage we had in 1970. Even a fully paid-up townie like myself can tell that’s a pretty brutal ‘new look’ for the countryside.

How’s it happened? Well you can’t lay it all at the supermarkets’ door. UK government and EU policies have had a big effect too. But with supermarkets mostly stocking apples imported from New Zealand, South Africa and China – varieties that can survive long distance travel and look good on the shelf – native British apples are basically unprofitable. So the ancient orchards get the chop.

Ah, but that’s just Globalisation, you might say. Such tragedies are unavoidable when it’s cheaper to fly bulk quantities of chilled Fuji apples across the world than to buy small volumes of Ribston Pippins or Laxton’s Superb from a producer down the road.

True, to a point. But there are 2,300 varieties of apple native to the UK. When was the last time you saw more than a couple of them in the supermarket? Have you even heard of endangered varieties such as the Ribston Pippin or Laxton’s Superb? (Neither had I.)

Back on the high street, I’m buying my apples in a local shop. They might sometimes be more expensive than down at the supermarket, but I see having a decent greengrocer’s so close to home as, well, priceless.

These days Chatsworth Road counts as a rare breed: a local high street with a renegade spirit and a fine tradition of independent trading. It’s proof that the downfall of the local high street is far from inevitable.

But the way things are going on other high streets, it’s a case of ‘use it or lose it’. (2,000 small shops close per week, nationally.) Recession or no recession, times have been tough on local high streets for many years. And this has been linked to our national love affair with the supermarkets. Time and again it’s been proved: when a new supermarket opens or expands, small shops close.

I know that on my own, shopping on my local high street won’t singlehandedly ensure its future. But a familiar phrase comes to mind: ‘every little helps’.

I’m hoping that the Chatsworth Road Traders & Residents Association can help promote a street that is as much about being a shared public space, and a reflection of a community’s unique character, as it is about a brilliant set of locally owned shops.

And that potential for community involvement is really the key. Because a local high street belongs to the people in the way a supermarket never can. We all have a stake in it.

Offering your support to that idea does not need to involve reinventing the wheel or any great expense. There are 50,000 people living in Clapton – enough of us to ensure that if we want a bustling local high street we can have one, now and in years to come. So long as we feel inspired to get involved, each in our own way.

Even if that only means buying apples.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 9:48 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.