Matt ask:

Who is best to write to to raise concerns about the opening of Nando’s and Frankie & Benny’s in Greenwich? The council, a planning team, Greenwich Hospital estate? Do you know? I want to do what I can to object to any more chain/big name brands opening up in the area.

The Phantom replies:

Matt, you are one of a number of people who are quite upset at our getting a pair of chains as the first thing people see when they arrive at Greenwich Pier on the boat.  And I have to say I’m particularly un-jazzed about the signs, especially, which I feel cheapen the traditional view of Greenwich from Island Gardens (actually, I have a bit of a bag-on for the whole pier building with its nasty fake copper finish and…no, I promise not to go off on one about that today…)

Thing is, though, I’m not convinced that it’s possible for the council to refuse permission to a company just because they’re a chain – it would be discrimination of a sort and I can’t see that it’s legally enforceable to refuse one place that serves food because you don’t like the cut of their jib and allow another establishment that also serves food to open in the same place instead just because they’re a nice local indie. Hell – if we could do that we’d have booted out a hell of a lot of very bad restaurants in the centre of town by now and replaced them with lovely places that sell decent food.

Until I am the Phantom Despot of Greenwich Towne, and I can decree that henceforth only shops and eateries I like are allowed to trade, I suspect I have two choices. The first is to make it clear to places like Greenwich Hospital and whoever owns the pier (‘m not sure who that is…) that I want to encourage indies to flourish rather than to ban chains which would be legally hard.

With gardening if you encourage enough nice flowers the weeds don’t get a look in. Independents need to be allowed the space and time to grow, and not to feel that they are being leant on all the time by landlords who would rather have the big, reliable bucks they can get from multinationals.

The second is simple – don’t go to the chains and do go to the indies. This is, admittedly, harder, given that most of the chains’ trade is from tourists who often head for what they know – but if the indies look good and enough locals are seen going inside them, hopefully visitors will be intrigued to visit them too.

I agree – we need to be vocal on this and let big landlords – Greenwich Hospital Trust being the biggest in the town centre – know that we want one of the last remaining largely-independent shopping centres to stay that way. Whether it will have any effect will be interesting, of course. Ultimately GHT is answerable to its trustees, whose aim in life is to get the most cash for their charity, not to us who just live in the place they own.

Thanks to Paul for the pic, BTW…

Freaky – just as my computer pinged and someone asked if I’d had a leaflet about this, the thing popped through my door…

I guess whether you welcome Sainsburys eco-store closing so they can build a giant new one down the road will, to some extent at least, depend on where you live.

Anyone Greenwich side of the current store will probably, like me, sigh and count the extra walking time to get a pint of milk  and a bag ‘o buns (unless they’re local shopkeepers who will be rubbing their hands with glee – certainly my local corner shop will do much better, especially if he stops only stocking non-free-range eggs, which I’ve told him on many an occasion I will not buy under even the most egg-strapped circumstances…)

Anyone Charlton side will probably be rather pleased, given the land’s been empty for years and my dream of it being levelled and turned into a gorgeous walled garden centre was always unlikely to come true.

So where is the magical newly re-named ‘Meridian Site’?  Well – several degrees east of the actual Meridian, I can tell you that.

Well, I have to say the map they supply isn’t very clear. Here it is:

It looks to me like it’s the bit where Wickes and a load of old warehouses currently reside, though at first I thought it might be that big walled area behind ASDA.

They promise a giant shopping experience with TU clothes (whoo-bloomin’-hoo) homewares, a cafe  and an ‘Explore Learning Centre,’ which apparently will teach extra maths and English to kiddies.

Personally I have no real objection to the building of a whopping great store on the site of well, not very much really, but I do feel a bit fed up that the old building will be let to a ‘non-food retailer.’ I know why that is, of course, and it is good news for Greenwich’s smaller shopkeepers, but it will make  shopping for all the dull items like toilet rolls and washing powder into a right royal palaver for most people west of the A102(M).

They’re having the usual consultation, on Friday 21st, and Saturday 22nd October at Valley House, 445 Woolwich Road, SE7 7EP

Dunno what made me do it, really. I guess nosiness, and the vague fear that Greenwich might have something to worry about from a vast mall ten minutes down the tube. And what the hell made me choose Saturday to explore Stratford’s new Westfield shopping centre beggars belief. I can only put it down to heatstroke.

It’s easy to get to, I’ll give it that. I had had some idea that it would be a trudge from the station, but one of the exits from Stratford tube leads straight into this melee of retail opportunity and human mass. I have never seen quite so many people milling through a mall, and it’s not even finished yet (though of course the empty stores have been done out very artistically so they don’t look too boarded up.)

There were queues outside some of the shops that are open, and everywhere else it seemed that the entire population of Britain had decided to wander up and down faceless aisles trying to find the way out.

I guess the best way to describe it is that it’s like Bluewater without the charm (and yes I do know what I’m saying here…) and, when the crowds have died down I suppose that it will be an alternative to Oxford St for the big chains but I can’t see that I’ll be returning soon.

The only place I actively liked was Wahaca, latest in a superior chain of Mexican restaurants. There aren’t, as far as I can see, any indie eateries (or indie-anything) in Westfield, but as chains go, this was very good indeed. My friend and I shared several plates from their street-food selection and enjoyed everything we were served.

Back to the scrum, and I was beginning to get bit freaked out by it all; a bit panicky in the crowds. In the end I just couldn’t face going in most of the shops, merely nipping to M&S to change a birthday shirt that was too small and John Lewis to see the real reason why I came. This:

(as usual, click on the image to make it bigger)

On the top floor of John Lewis, if you can make your way through the tourist tat in the Official Olympic Store, there’s a viewing room, complete with seats and an info board. It’s really quite impressive, and, I think in retrospect, was worth the journey just to see history in action. You can also  see it from the end of one of Westfield’s streets, but this is the best view.

So – is it a threat to Greenwich? Absolutely no way – this is for a different kind of shopping – mass-market consumer basics type stuff that has a place – we all shop in chains from time to time – but is the exact opposite of the kind of one-off, inventive quirkiness that Greenwich offers.

I’d call it a serious threat to Stratford’s old shopping centre and market, by the theatre, but still hold out hope in that with all those thousands and thousands of people I saw on Saturday I didn’t see thousands and thousands of carrier bags. Stratford is still a town that needs shops for ‘real’ people who don’t do their weekly food shop at M&S and who still need to buy a plastic bucket or a clothes airer…

What we should see it as, however, is a warning – of what Greenwich could turn into if we were ever stupid enough to throw away our Unique Selling Point and buy into the chain-store-clonery that has blighted most of Britain’s towns. I met a woman at an event last night who, although she lives in Pimlico, went into raptures about shopping in Greenwich – something she does on a regular basis – because she can get really unusual stuff she couldn’t hope to find elsewhere.

We still have a real difference. Here’s to keeping it that way.

Westcombe folks will remember last week’s foray into the shops that have lined the little terrace to the South of Westcombe Park Station for the past hundred-odd years. I gaily ransacked Neil Rhind’s splendid History of Blackheath and Environs II for the information, but noticed that there wasn’t anything in the book on the teeny-tiny Station Crescent for me to plunder.

But ask and ye shall receive. I am delighted to be able to give you, in Neil’s own words, the little bit that got missed out from the book all those years ago.

Neil says:

“Never sure why I left out Station Road, Westcombe Park from Volume II. Probably exhaustion. After all, it ran to nigh on 500 pages, all typewriter clack-clack-clack and not word-processed in those days.
Herewith a quick catch up:

Station Road, sometimes Station Crescent and sometimes Beaconsfield Terrace. All on north-west side. More bootmakers than you could shake a stick at.

No 1: 1890. A grocery shop, run by Edward Pogson Barker and always known as Barker’s Stores until 1940

No 2: 1890. Greengrocery for ever. Started by John Cooper, then Zaccheus Harris, a widower, but Zaccheus and Elsie up until the late 1930s.

No 3: All sorts from 1891, starting as an estate agency, then a bakery and a builders’ merchants and from 1896 to 1940 toys, fancy goods, stationery and tobacco products sold by Joseph Allison Sole, then his widow, Isobel.

No 4: From1891 William James Jones, a bootmaker, then the Carter family in the same trade, but from 1905 oilman, hardware shop, and decorator, in the ownership and management of James Caleb Banks, or Caleb James Banks, or Cyril James Banks. Until at least the last (1939-1945) war.

A tiny shop nearer the station was variously a coal merchant’s order office, estate agency, builder, sweet shop, saddler, milliner, bootmakers, draper, ladies outfitter and an upholstery works, and a florist’s stall on the side.

Opposite, a small slip of a shop best known in recent years as the local Post Office (since 1915, closed a few years back) but a dozen or more trades from floristry to yet more bootmaking over the years.”

So, there you have it. Sadly there aren’t any current plans to reprint Volume II in its current form, but keep buying Volume I and Neil’s other book on the bit in the middle, The Heath and we might just show the publishers enough interest to get a revised reprint. In the meanwhile there are some rather fabulous new books to look out for, which I’m itching to get my sticky paws on.

In time for Christmas, we can expect the release of Neil’s latest work, a detailed history of the Paragon and South Row, as well as a couple of ‘fat pamphlets’ he’s been working on with some exciting other historians, one on the Pagoda & Montague House, the other on a rather amazing panorama that was rediscovered a few years ago. More on that at another date.

A History of Blackheath and Environs Volume III is scheduled for Spring.

BTW – apologies to Neil for filing him under ‘mostly’ accurate history. Being a Phantom of errors I simply do not have a section for ‘accurate’ history…

Christine asks:
Can anyone name all the shops from the sweet shop at the top of the steps – the first shop as you cross over from top of Halstow road where it crosses Humber Road? Then there was a super chemist, called Green’s; a greengrocers; some other shops  that I cannot recall; then, as the road turned down towards the station approach and down the steps, there was a food store that sold everything. Over the other side of station approach was the post office.  Does anyone have the history of all the shops around the Westcombe Park station area from Victorian times?

The Phantom replies:

Well, of course much of it is down to when in their history you want to know about them – in late Victorian times,  in the 20s/30s/ 40s/ 50s etc. Recently they have changed both purpose and owners far more regularly than they would have done years ago, but before the age of the supermarket, I guess the local greengrocer /chemist /sweetmonger would have stayed in the same generation for years.

I have always been rather fond of this little arcade. It doesn’t manage the same yumminess (or range) as the Royal Hill Lovelies, but then the demographic isn’t the same – and it’s closer to both the big sheds over on the Peninsula and the Blackheath Standard. But it still gets a fair bit of footfall, being so close to the station and some of the shops have been there for years.

I particularly like that it’s retained, somehow, some of the more ephemeral parts of its decoration – the post office may have gone but the pillar box is still there and if you look under your feet outside the mini mart, there are still the diamond-pattern tiles and, further up, the original York stone slab-paving.

I can’t name the shops recently, as they’ve changed quite a bit (and continue to change – I notice the old Animation Studio is being turned into a rather upmarket-looking florist; good news since that place has been inactive for years) but, thanks to the superb (and disgracefully out of print) definitive volume about the area by Neil Rhind, Blackheath Village and Environs II (the first one, about Blackheath Village itself, is back in print, but the equally-exhaustive second book, which takes in our side of the heath as well as the Cator estate and the more Kidbrooke-y side (wanna know who lived in your house? Chances are that if you’re in his catchment area Mr Rhind will tell you in this book) has never been reprinted.

I can’t think why – there must be more people in the wide area covered by book two who are potential customers – but there is usually a copy in the library (if it hasn’t been closed…) and occasionally they bowl up second-hand (talking of which, I was pleased to see a new secondhand bookshop in the centre of Greenwich – a dedicated Oxfam bookshop on College Approach. It’s pricey but these days second hand books tend to fall into two categories – expensive, and can’t-give-it-away.)

Rhind tells me that ‘Beaconsfield Terrace, ‘ built around the 1890s (it’s at the bottom of Beaconsfield road in case you’re wondering) is, along with the shops on Westcombe Hill, were the only commercial premises allowed on the Westcombe Park Estate. And when you come to think of it, yes, it does seem a bit odd – not a corner shop, not a pub, or at least until you get to the Royal Standard. Presumably it was some sort of temperance-thing.

Neil Rhind accepts that the shops changed a lot over the years, but reckons there’s a strong pattern. At Number 103, your sweet shop, Christine, was, in the 1920s, E. Hartley and Co. but between 1909 and the late 1920s is was Luffman & Peacock (a fabulous name for a confectioners.) If memory serves it’s a private house these days.

105 was a butchers, which is kind of chilling given that it’s now the local vetinery surgery and 107, now flats, a grocer and branch post office.  Its original owner was the equally-delightfully-named Edward Pogson Barker, but in the 1920s it became your chemist, Christine, run by John Codnor Wilson.

Number 109 started out as a greengrocers, became a milliner’s (we just don’t get hat shops round these parts any more…) and from the first year of the Great War until the middle of WWII was Jarvis the bootmaker. Am I right in thinking that the sports therapy place is there now?

Neil Rhind tells me that number 111 has been a lot of things – a stationer’s, tailor, printer and grocers, and in the 1930s was Humber Radio (presumably selling wirelesses rather than broadcasting…) 113 was a dairy – first owned by Griffith Robert Hughes, becoming a branch of Edward and Sons and finally being subsumed into United Dairies. It’s now a hairdressers.

What I can’t find is any reference to the shops that turn the corner into Westcombe Crescent going down towards the station. Am I missing something, Neil?

So, there I was, eco bags in spectral paw, standing puzzled outside some very locked gates this morning. No signs, no notice, no discreet email – if not to me to someone, would have been useful.

I guess it was inevitable, really. A market needs two things and they need each other. One, enough stalls and produce to tempt hordes of people to visit, and two, enough people to tempt hordes of stalls to decamp there in the first place.

Greenwich farmers market at its very outset didn’t really have enough stalls to make it work, and many of them were ‘specialist’ – I mean a Phantom only has use for so many logs impregnated with fungal spores, and probably won’t need more than one cupcake stall per trip.

People did turn up that first morning, but the size of that day’s market probably meant punters decided then and there they’d only prefer this one to Blackheath if they actually lived in East Greenwich or West Charlton – it just wasn’t exciting enough to bring visitors from further afield. From then on, it seemed to go on a downward spiral and though much of the produce was good (I’ll mourn the Kentish cheddar, personally) there just wasn’t enough choice to make people travel any kind of distance to visit specially, and unlike Blackheath, which is surrounded by the village and shops, you had to make a special trip to Halstow School, with only the cafe in the park as a companion-destination.

And of course the stallholders travel miles too (which has always bothered me – surely the idea of local produce is that your tomatoes come from down the road, not the Isle of Wight…) One of the meat guys travelled god-knows-how-many food miles from Up North to be there – and to not sell enough sausages/joints/pies to cover his petrol can’t have endeared him to the project, much as his bacon sandwiches will be missed.

I’ve heard that stall hire on farmers markets in general is too much for other, smaller traders to take an initial punt and perhaps this also contributed to this one’s demise. Perhaps Saturdays are already popular with other, more established markets and stallholders already had pitches elsewhere. Perhaps once a week was too often.  Perhaps it was too far East and should have been somewhere just off Traf Road – Meridian School, for example.  Or there is that other ‘perhaps’ – perhaps East Greenwich just plain isn’t posh enough to support non-supermarket shopping.

I once asked the cheese lady how it was going and inadvertently launched a tirade of fury which seemed to be aimed at me personally for not forcibly dragging my neighbours along every week. And she might have a point.

They built it. We didn’t come.

I’ve been enjoying the EGFM every Saturday morning – they’ve been going for a month now, and it’s beginning to bed-down a bit. Not all the stalls are there all the time, which means I’ve missed out a couple of times on things I’d hoped to get, but hopefully as the year moves on,  more stalls will open and more people discover it (it’s in Halstow Road School playground, folks – you can get to it either from Halstow or Kemsing Roads )it will begin to really take off. My favourite stall by a long chalk is the Kentish Cheddar – straight from cow to churn (or however they make it) and fabulously strong stuff – pricey but well worth it.

Chris from RGFM tells me they’re looking to expand – and they’re looking for local artisans and foodies to take a stall or two.

I confess I don’t know much about running any kind of stall so I asked a few basics.

Produce does actually have to be locally sourced – but as far as I can tell ‘local’ is a relative concept – there’s a guy selling Isle of Wight garlic for starters (the stuff in jars is v. good.) Chris was a bit coy about revealing the trade secrets of rules and regs but says you can get a pack from City and Country Farmers Markets at info@weareccfm.com.

Stalls cost between £25 and £40. You can sell your allotment surplus, but check that council byelaws allow it – perhaps you can do it for your favourite charity if you’re not allowed to sell-on for ‘profit.’ Also, depending on what you want to produce the Food Safety department of the council might want to inspect your premises, and City and Country Farmers Markets might also want to check it out.

I would love to see more stalls – the more the merrier. Plants, fish, meats, cheese, veg, sweeties, pies, bring ‘em on. Just no more cupcakes, eh, we have more than enough already and I’m trying to lose weight.

Just been looking at pages 23 and 24 of this week’s Big Issue which have sundry special offers from Greenwich retailers as some kind of advertorial promotion thingy.

Most of them are money off stuff or extra freebies – 20% off veg at the Creaky Shed for example, or a free coffee if you eat in at Royal Teas. All very useful – there are eight vouchers in total, all of which are places where I have bought something in the past. I shall be getting the Phantom scissors out.

But my favourite offer is definitely from the traditional games shop Compendia.

“Free game of Carron with staff.”

In these cash-strapped days, it’s interesting to see that Compendia have decided to give extra value in a way other than money off. They’ve thought about what their customers like – playing games – and worked out a way where they don’t have to lose money from sales, but they still get people through the door (and presumably if you work in a games shop you like playing games too, so everyone wins.)

I wonder if other stores will start thinking in similarly lateral ways and start doing special offers that make you smile. Money off is all very nice, but I rather like Compendia’s make-do-and-mend approach. I’ve never played Carron before but hey – I’ll give it a go.  I wonder what their next offer will be “Help put together 3,000-piece jigsaw of the Royal Wedding,” perhaps?

If I didn’t know better I’d have thought Nick was a part-time publicist for Sainsburys. For the last few weeks he’s been hopping up and down like a toddler who needs a wee, desperate for the new store to open in Greenwich’s ugliest shopping centre, just opposite the old Borough Hall. 

He says “Finally we won’t have to deal with the hopeless Co-Op and its amazing queuing system and inability to regularly stock milk and eggs.”

To be honest I hadn’t even noticed that the Co-Op had stopped being a Somerfield – I gave up on it ages ago. I guess it’s done for now – unless they raise their game considerably. Though, thinking about it, the Co-Op in Trafalgar Road still has massive queues after it re-furbed when a Tesco opened a cough and a spit away, so maybe it’s a little early to write an obit.

The shops that I worry rather more about are the Royal Hill Lovelies – the high-quality, independent stores that rely on service and convenience rather than price to entice shoppers. All the time they only had a rubbish supermarket to deal with, they have been relatively safe, but if Sainsburys ups the ante enough, it could mean a slow trickle of shoppers just nipping in there after work, meaning to patronise the small shops later, but somehow slipping into the habit of it. 

Sainsbury’s isn’t top of the tree, supermarket-wise. A Waitrose would be far more of a threat to the RHLs. But it’s likely to have been the most successful food retailer last Christmas, and it certainly piles ‘em high and sells ‘em relatively cheap. 

We don’t really have a precedent in Trafalgar Road with cute independent stores (sigh) though La Salumeria had a re-fit after the invasion of Tesco, and it still seems to be doing well (it’s hard to tell, but it’s looking good, despite their sad loss last year…) And there’s actually been a new greengrocer’s open since then. I don’t know how they’re doing, but they clearly thought they could go head to head with two local supermarkets, when they wrote their business plan. 

Only time will tell. All I know is that Nick’s beside himself with excitement at the idea of shopping at Sainsburys. And I know the feeling. I used to have the same irrational joy whenever I walked into a Woolworths. I guess Nick will be hoping that Sainsburys doesn’t follow that particular shop’s career path.

It wasn’t so very long ago that we didn’t have an old fashioned sweetie shop at all in Greenwich. I remember fantasising on this blog about having a proper place that weighed out your rhubarb and custards or your gobstoppers from big glass jars into little stripy paper bags. My dream-store was actually the teeny little store halfway up Steep Hill in Lincoln – all dark and cosy, decorated with love – and the kind of sweet tins that cram Robert Opie’s museum . Playing jolly songs from the 1940s, it remains the only place that I’ve ever been able to buy summer creams. 

So I was delighted when Mr Humbug arrived in Greenwich Market. It wasn’t quite my fantasy embodied but hey – it was close enough. I have spent far more than my waistline would like in that shop and it’s always jam-packed full of people at the weekends. 

But, as we are always being told, we should be careful about what we ask for, and my magic-wish  fairy is clearly actually the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I guess it was back in the summer that a second old fashioned sweetie shop emerged, this time on Church Street and the battle for Greenwich’s sweet tooth began. 

They are both franchises – though Mr Humbug is by far the smaller of the two – there’s just the one other store, in Norfolk, though they’re actively seeking new franchisees. Mr Simms is now getting to be on pretty much every high street in Britain – hell – there’s even one in Bluewater these days – and despite the cod ‘old fashionedness’ of the place, it is the one that feels most ‘corporate’ – there’s a certain plasticness to the whole place from the fake leaded lights to the dark cubicles containing the sweet jars. Curiously, when I was looking for a website for the place,  I couldn’t find any address for the parent company or any actual numbers of stores, though there must be dozens of ‘em.

Both sell almost identical goods at pretty much identical prices. They both have minimum purchase weights – which I riled at at first, but then I do vaguely recall a minimum weight back in my primary school days – which wouldn’t have been an issue except that being a kid I wanted to have as many different sweeties as I could and minimum weights made me choose (that’s just one of the reasons I still mourn the passing of Woolworths.) But the minimum weight thing is differently couched in each shop. Mr Humbug only tells us there’s a minimum if we threaten to go under it, whereas it’s the first thing they tell you in Mr Simms, which immediately puts my back up. The days are gone where I go in with 2p and I’m not leaving until I’ve spent it all – I AM almost certainly going to buy more than 100g of something – I don’t want my greeting to consist of being told I have to spend a certain amount. 

But then neither of these shops are actually aiming at children. They know that most kids these days would rather have a nice safe packet of something. Both of these stores are appealing to the child in adults and Phantoms, and play on received memories, however real they actually might be. 

To be honest, I think that there’s probably room for both stores. They both enjoy prime locations - one in the market, the other catching tourists as they come out of the DLR. I’ve tried ‘em both (several times – research, obviously…)  and apart from the fact that I find Mr Humbug a bit friendlier (the girl in there chats to me as though I’m an old friend, despite the fact that I’m not) and with better bags (pink and stripy, and thick enough not to disintegrate, even if you buy a lot – Mr Simms’s bags are brown, small and thin – I discovered about 150g-worth of licorice torpedos rolling around in the bottom of my shopping and an empty, torn paper bag last time I went there) there really isn’t that much to choose between the actual goods and prices. 

In fact thinking about it I reckon we could have even more sweet shops. Bring ‘em on – I promise to try ‘em all.