One columnist counts the shopfronts lost to rent, not riots

I counted them on my walk to the station this morning. Four shopfronts on my own high street now wearing that particular shade of estate agent white paint that means “something is coming, and it is almost certainly a phone repair shop or a coffee chain you’ve never heard of that will close within eighteen months anyway.”

I’ve lived in this corner of North London for eleven years, which is long enough to remember when the hardware shop on the corner was run by a man named Trevor who could tell you exactly which screw you needed just by looking at the thing you were trying to fix. Trevor retired three years ago. His shop is now a place that sells artisanal ice pops for four pounds fifty.

The Slow Disappearing Act

This isn’t a new complaint, and I’m aware that “local columnist mourns the death of the high street” is roughly the most predictable sentence a London journalist can write. But living through it feels different from reading about it in a trend piece. It’s not one dramatic closure. It’s death by a thousand rent reviews, each one perfectly explicable on its own terms, each one adding up to a high street that increasingly looks like every other high street.

Local council data shows commercial rents in this postcode have climbed steadily even as footfall from independent shoppers, the kind who actually walk in and buy a single lightbulb rather than order sixteen on a delivery app, has continued to soften. The landlords aren’t villains exactly. Most of them are pension funds and property companies making entirely rational decisions about yield. It’s just that “entirely rational” and “genuinely pleasant place to buy a birthday card” have quietly stopped being the same thing.

What Actually Replaces What Leaves

The pattern by now is almost comically predictable. A greengrocer becomes a vape shop. A launderette becomes a nail bar. A proper caff, the kind with laminated menus and a full breakfast for under a fiver, becomes a “concept space” that sells matcha and closes by four in the afternoon. I don’t begrudge anyone their matcha. I just notice that the businesses that replace the old guard tend to require considerably less footfall from people who actually live on the street, and considerably more footfall from people passing through.

Local business associations have pushed for reduced business rates for genuinely independent shops, a proposal that’s been discussed at council level for years without much visible movement. One shop owner I spoke to, who has run a small bakery here for over two decades, put it more bluntly than any council report has managed. “Nobody’s trying to kill the high street,” she told me. “They’re just not trying particularly hard to save it either, and eventually that amounts to the same thing.”

The Bit Where I Try Not to Be Entirely Miserable About It

In fairness, not everything that’s changed is worse. There’s a proper little bookshop two streets over that’s somehow thriving, run by a woman who does themed window displays that stop actual pedestrians in their tracks. There’s a community-run space that hosts everything from baby groups to a Thursday night pub quiz that gets genuinely competitive. Change isn’t automatically decline. Sometimes it’s just change, and I should probably stop being so precious about a hardware shop that, if I’m honest, I only visited about four times a year even when Trevor was still running it.

But there’s a difference between organic change and the specific flavour of homogenisation that turns every high street in this city into a variation on the same theme: coffee, phone repairs, a nail bar, and a “concept space” that will not survive the next rent review either.

What I’d Actually Like to See

Not nostalgia dressed up as policy. Something more specific: meaningful business rate relief tied directly to genuinely independent ownership, council-backed pop-up schemes that give new small businesses a realistic trial period at manageable rent, and a bit more scrutiny of exactly who’s buying up these units and what they actually plan to do with them beyond banking the freehold’s rising value.

None of that is radical. Some of it is already technically council policy, unevenly applied. Mostly what’s missing is anyone with real power treating the high street’s slow disappearance as an actual emergency rather than background noise to be gently regretted in columns exactly like this one.

My local Prat.uk colleagues covering the property beat have their own theories about where this ends up, most of them more pessimistic than mine. I’ll keep walking past the ice pop shop and thinking about Trevor regardless.

You can find more of my North London dispatches at my author page, where I promise at least one future column that isn’t about shopfronts.

For further reading on the high street crisis, see coverage from The Evening Standard and CityAM.

One Last Thing About Trevor

I ran into him a few months back, quite by accident, in the queue at the post office. He’s doing well, apparently spends most of his time now helping his son-in-law renovate a house in Kent, which he described with the same precise, slightly exasperated authority he used to bring to explaining wood screws. I asked if he missed the shop. He thought about it properly, the way he thought about everything, and said he missed the customers more than the shop itself. “You get to know people through what they’re trying to fix,” he said. “Nobody comes in for a lightbulb and doesn’t end up telling you something about their week.”

That’s the part I think actually gets lost when a shop like his disappears, more than the specific inventory or even the specific building. It’s not really about hardware. It’s about the accumulated, unglamorous, everyday version of a community that gets built out of a thousand small conversations over a counter, the kind that don’t happen quite the same way over a self-checkout screen or a delivery app notification. I don’t have a tidy solution for that. I’m not sure anyone does. But it feels worth saying out loud occasionally, even in a column that’s already run a bit long about ice pops.