Mary Portas, shopping guru, has delivered to the Prime Minister a review of the state of our high streets and town centres. I was able to get a copy from the Printed Paper Office of the Lords. I noticed this weekend that there are considerably fewer people out shopping on my own local high street than there were a year ago, due no doubt to the recession, internet shopping and the discount “village” not far away.
While no one can disagree that many of our towns’ and cities’ high streets need revitalisation, there are differences of opinion about what they are for, and how they are used. My own perspective is of course as a working wife and, for a period, working mother, ie always in a hurry and always short of time. So I do not share the general snobbery about supermarkets, especially out-of-town ones, and I like Tesco’s. The Portas review, however, envisages the high street as a place where people stroll all day carrying nothing other than a handbag, and have time to chat as they go from the butcher’s to the grocer’s to the hardware shop. The Portas perspective takes me back to when my mother would have to visit the high street shops every day to buy small quantities, and chat to each shopkeeper; shopping was apparently designed then to place obstacles in the way of women going to work. Not only that, but children, pushchairs and wheelchairs do not feature in the Portas vision. There is a charming colour picture in the review of a disneyfied high street, showing not a single baby or other impediment, only the unencumbered, outdoors dining tables and lots of benches. This is not the reality for anyone who has ever tried to fit in a week’s shopping after 5pm or at the weekend, or had to make their way around with a toddler and a baby in a buggy. While small supermarkets may have a place in the high street, there can be no sense in locating large ones there: how on earth would you carry several bags home when buses are far away from the pedestrianised streets of this paradise, and even if they were closer the large weekly shopping burden would be unmanageable? Many towns are doing their best to keep cars out by making parking difficult, expensive and rare. And even if you take the bus in, it is impossible to buy more than one can carry. So welcome to the out-of-town supermarkets and malls: safe, warm, dry, convenient, open at hours when working people can get there, and enabling choice and competition. And good to know that some supermarkets lay on buses to help shoppers get there from town. Why shouldn’t the supermarkets sell a range of clothes and househood goods, if that is what we want? There is also a lot in the review about “communities” using their high streets for worthy Big Society type activities. I am not convinced.
Perhaps my reaction to the review is coloured by my visit to the Mary Portas boutique within a London department store. When it opened, we were promised quality fashion for the over 40s. On my first visit, there was so little lighting I couldn’t see anything. The next time I went, there were lots of short dresses in fluorescent colours, as everywhere else. All that was left of the only skirt I liked were sizes 6 and 8. (Gentlemen readers – think of Nancy Reagan; if you are too young to remember her, think of Kate Moss.) Most lady peers don’t come in that shape . . .
Happy Xmas to everyone!
Thanks Baroness Deech for your views on our High Streets. You make valid points about access. As a foster carer with multiple children I understand the buggies and the toddler scenario. However if there is a choice between Tesco and town my children inevitably pick town. Why does it always win my children’s votes? It is because of the range of interesting shops. It is the conversations with shop keepers and the personal approach and interest they take in children. It is because you never know what is going to happen such as street entertainment, special events, a trip to the library, an open air picnic, bumping into people you know, wondering about the history of the buildings, watching the canoeists on the river, exploring the excitement of a market, etc. The sanitised impersonal glass boxes of Tesco cannot compete. I am not talking about a London High Street but an economically deprived area of multiple deprivation in the north east. Stockton High Street’s community spirit is dented but not dead and a new generation is rising up wanting to overhaul the High Street to ensure that it remains at the heart of our community.
This women, Mary, is not playing with a full deck. She simply does not want to look at reality. And unless she is willing to stop the pretense, you may as well put what she is saying in the can.
First and foremost, our High Street shopping areas will continue to have fewer and fewer shoppers until the councils and or government decide to face up to the fact that parking charges are a tax on shoppers. Do you really feel they are going to travel on dreadful buses and tubes, or, whatever they have on offer in rural areas, to take home their packages, possibly with kids in tow. If you really believe you can wean us off the car for this purpose, then you may as well jack it in now. That is unrealistic.
The West End of London is going to see a decrease in shoppers now the idiot Westminster Council has decided to extend parking to Saturday afternoons and Sundays. And the business rates you charge with no walking customers is a laugh a minute.
Add to that, those poor souls with no money who live in central London, the elderly, disabled and poor, will now have very few visitors for their families and friends simply cannot afford it.
Oh, and don’t play the ‘we have a reduced rate for visitors,’ card, that is not going to make up for ‘free parking’ with families who are feeling financial strain.
You know we must be run by teenagers in this country. They have no connection whatsoever with real life.
We have the interne. Women who have worked day and night all week to keep a family going are unable to find either the time or the inclination to spend ours trying to find a parking place, to no avail. After that, drag kids around the streets in the hope they may find what they are looking for.
And the only shop worth bothering with is John Lewis, the rest is TAT. Only teenagers looking for the latest sheap line from the third workd sweat shop is interested in that. And even they are tired of the effort it takes when they can order what they want on line.
Now you knew this was coming when the internet began but you chose to ignore it. Yet, it is going to get worse.
The Mall’s in London are filled with ripp off merchants, stealing the wares as they go about their fun day out. You have to be really prepared to have your wallet, bag or packages stolen before you can get out of these places. They are as bad as the souk, if not worse, you take your life in your hands now.
And who is to blame for that? Could it be multi culturalism? No, of course not, that is politically incorrect and we mustn’t think that way or we will be regarded as rascists and sent to jail, should we dare face the truth.
And one step further, when you get inside these places, the whole experience is a nightmare. Massive strips of unhealthy and disorientating lighting. Rows of ugly rails strewn around the walls. Sales people who are too busy with their chats to friends on mobiles, or, can’t speak English, or, don’t know what they have in stock. Try Boots, a one time good chemist, now full or people who ‘don’t know what you mean’ what is that? The idiot brigade who have no business being inside a chemist in the first place.
The point is, the Hight Street is no longer a fun place to go. It is a nightmare, so all the Mary’s in the world are not worth the time of day.
Now if you want an example of sweet shopping, take a look at the movie ‘Pretty Woman’ and notice the difference in Rodeo Drive. There are of course others, like Worth Avenue in Palm Beach. And I know you are going to say, ‘but, that is for those who have more money than sense.’ That is not the point. There is convenient free parking, clean places to sit and eat. Spotless streets and an inviting atmosphere.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-hlBMMhLlg
And it is on a human scale. Pretty, comforting and service oriented.
Or, for the City, think New York, Fifth Avenue. I know they don’t gift wrap any more without a really hard push, but, it is exciting to go there. And you have to walk if you want to go more than one block.
Can you see a differnece like, no dirty street. Fun things to do. A sense of occassion. Then there is Rockerfeller Center.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydy8jn7DWVI
New York City doesn’t stink, ripp you off, or make it difficult to shop. They deliver where possible, which means people of bicycle dropping your stuff off within the time frame you tell them you can make.
Or, there is Paris.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=sYeWvvRi_XA&feature=endscreen
Or, for the ladies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HMKOXtq2vw
Again, clean. And welcoming. A joy to browse. Not a nightmare with the dreadful fear you will end up with typhoid disease.
Sadly, it seemed to me that the most interesting question wasn’t asked – let alone answered, and that is “do we need a high street any more?”
Obviously, a street of empty shops and half-let offices above will be appalling, yet that is the future of a high street that expanded in the 1950s-1980s and is now contracting.
Rather than trying to reverse a very natural process, I would have liked to see reviews of planning laws to make it easier for the perimeters of shopping areas to be converted back into residential housing/offices/whatever, and the isolated retailers on the edges offered incentives to move into the center.
A smaller tighter “high street” would look better, be easier for shoppers and likely to survive better as a shopping destination.
The costs of the bunching up of retailers being funded by the development of the now-empty blocks at the edges of the shopping area.
Favouring residential development also means you bring residents into the town centre, further supporting the smaller local businesses.
The big “out of town” stores will carry on regardless, as will online shopping.
Lets shrink the high street, not try to preserve it.
The planning officers take a very different view of what is happening in the high street,
chasing rounbd to find any number of pseudo-charities to fill empty shops at least to make it look as though there is some business going on in their particular patch.
And the number of coffee bars, and restaurants! The pattern of business has utterly and completely changed in the last thirty years, before which it was largely as the baroness and Portas describe.
The pattern of business due to the recession
will be visible and evident in mid January, thru to late February when some ships, bursting at the seams for the rest of the year, will report, not a single customer, for several days.
Such was the mood for something to do last year, in one local shop that I visited, that
I felt as though I had done something wrong the moment I got in there! It was not I who had sinned, but all the other customers and the completely bored assistants standing there for days at a time, with absolutely nothing to do. Winter time is like that but not usually as bad, and getting worse.
The retail trade in the high street is in a parlous state. Managers rule where once the sole trader did polite service, and managers whilst dedicated, do not have the same manners, or good sense of the customer always being right, as the sole trader ever did. The idea that a customer can “short change” the shop, by not buying something in a shop she has walked in to is, to me, an anathema of good trading.
The possibility of Georgian high streets becoming once again what they were when they were built, the “town” residences of affluent business people, but not shopkeepers at all, is high.
The chances of an increase in the incidence in heart disease from too much stimulation from the drug caffeine is also higher.
The eating habits of the people of these tiny islands have changed too. In the 1950s the only people who ate out, living in the London suburbs were the city types, and a good many of them took sandwiches.
Today in the West country high street near which I live, there are about 30 eating places in a small town centre,(30,000pop) where there were only two, 30 years ago.
Some people eat out every day, on large disposable incomes, dispensing their largesse,a habit acquired no doubt from seeing how the Latin world spends its lunchtimes. The weather does not allow quite as fine a pavement culture even so.
And the beggars…… they are going home for Xmas too.
I celebrate mine, hermetically, which is what I enjoy. The more frenzied and stressed
people get towards Saturnalia the more withdrawn in to my own shell,I endeavour to become. The way the large number of people celebrate in this country leaves, not the hungry and homeless in distress, but certain types, with a distinct feeling of great and unassuaged anxiety, for the future of the past, of solitude, a whole variety of things.
I am able to re-assure them, that
solitude at the time of year, is a great blessing, and to be treasured as such, not like scrooge, but in praise and worship at the Birth of the infant Jesus.
I wish I knew more about the festivals of
Judaism and Islam, for I would gladly celebrate them too, in the same way as the people of Malaya! National holidays for all the religious festivals of all the main faiths, every year! Now there is wisdom for you!
Xmas is a commercial festival, with very little to do with the birth of Christ.
It should be reduced in length, sometimes three weeks,to one day, in favour of the high points of the year of Judaism and Islam, even Shiva and the Buddha too!
Do enjoy December 25th. Don’t let the money grubbing traders get any moths out of your pockets until mid January. Then you will get a little civility from them, quite unfamiliar at any other time of year.
Be ready for winter!
Sadly I think @IanVisits has it right – that the decline in the high street is an inevitability that should not be unduly resisted. So let us see more flexibility in class uses for the peripheral fringes of a shopping area where the shops, through lack of footfall, are struggling to survive. Certainly let us see reversion to residential use, or to combined shop/back office.
The same also applies to office accommodation. I am far from convinced that the future will involve massive blocks of offices with drones in rows bashing their keyboards. We should encourage conversion of offices into housing, and what is more ensure the same standard of housing is achieved as the standard of offices. It is extraordinary that many people work in an environment that is far more plush than their own homes.
The real tragedy is how the internet feeds off the availability of shops that enable “Peruse but buy at home off the internet”. Bookshops are especially vulnerable to this, having to stock say 5,000 titles only to suffer the indignity of the shopper to cheerily say they’ll order their choices from Amazon. Record shops – now of course selling CDs – will also collapse for similar reasons. What is unfair is the VAT advantage an off-shore internet vendor can enjoy.
I doubt whether @Twm O’r Nant is right – planning officers are busy enough as it is to have any time to chase around for charities to fill high street vacant shops. But there is a quiet satisfaction to there being no boarded up shops which are a serious drag on the attractiveness of any high street.
I suppose one benefit from all this may be the dropping – well, at least no further rises – of parking charges in or near high streets. Those who knew the old Chichester of the 1950s may now rue the ripping out of all those back gardens and back streets to create the parking lots that were supposed to ensure the viability of East, South, West and North Street shops. May these perhaps return to housing over time?
You’ve definitely struck a cord with me there Lady Deech. I love the notion of drifting round my local village from exquisite little delicatessen to fashion shops designed specially for baronesses and at weekends I do indeed shop on the local small town High Street for that special cheese, hardware necessities for the handy-man and in the local farmers market for something local. But it’s the carrying that gets me down…whereas I can park at Waitrose, or Morrison or Tesco, all of which I use occasionally, without having to carry anything. Online groceries are the only way to shop in London during a working week and frankly I’ve almost given up clothes shopping except on line, where baroness sizing isn’t made to feel abnormal as it almost is on the average City High Street or ghastly shopping mall and over 40 styling doesn’t mean a fluorescent miniskirt over leggings and boots. I’m not very optimistic about High Streets; I love the idea of them but then hardly use them.
Marylebone High St and St John’s Wood High St seem to work well. What can the reason be? Maybe because they are situated in the midst of fairly affluent areas used for both work offices and residential. They are easily accessible – like the old fashioned shopping parade in the suburb close to where I live, which has everything one can need and limitless free parking, all on one level.
Then there is the out of town councils who want to rob the shopper. If you go to B&Q in the rural area of say, Redditch, for example, you better go on a day when they have few people and you can move as fast as a top playing footballer. There you have exactly 2 hours to shop or you get an eighty pound fine for being a minute over your time.
Now this place is the size of a football pitch and you have to guess which isle you need. The disabled find it hard to get around and the service is so slow you have to wait an hour for anyone to give you the information on any item you may want.
So, after you finally get outside and the stuff in your car, you releax and feel the task was done and now you can get a cup of tea.
Well, all is well until around three weeks later a fine arives on the door mat telling you to pay up or you will be in court in a trice. Eighty pounds will be doubled if you delay. That makes it £140 for a rough two hours nad one minute. And you wonder why the custom is slacking off.
At that point you decide to howl down the phone at the B&Q staff who then put you straight. It isn’t their company that does it, it is the council who insists on this objectionable practice, it is they who decide how long you should take to load up.
Now why, if they want the public to spend, do they put a tax on going to the shop? As I said above, teenagers run the show, no one else could be so outof touch.
And as for the Baronesses in need of gowns. The best bet for you is to get the same people who run the cheap booze and gift shops for MP’s and Lords in that big building where you work, to put in a special boutique for rounded ladies at wholesale prices. Seating, ample service, cups of tea on supply. How wonderful.
That way, you don’t have to face busy and dirty streets, get wet in the rain, or, pay full price. Just as you don’t when you want to take relatives or friends for lunch or dinner, ply them with booze or Havanna cigars and watch the river go by on the terrace.
Happy shopping!
It’s the human scale. The vintage feel of slipping from shop to shop in an intimate kind of way.Tna dthe Waitrose there is bite size.
There is also a carpark around the back of the Waitrose store. Or, Waitrose will deliver.
All you have to do is load up your basket, pay and register. And Acado delivers. Best to go first thing in the morning for same day delivery.
Marylebone High Street has that nice, not too packed feel, about it. And of course, Paul’s when you want to nip in for a sit down.
Good to see a peer’s lifeplace-experience being revealed; thank you.
One major workplace you could, and someplaces still can, find a female employee able to and even good at fitting in some intelligent or warmly-fruity conversation or ‘gossip’ (either negative, neutral, or positive)
is behind the shop counter.
It is so nice being unhibitedly called “Darling” or “My handsome”
(and I stock a few original responses thereto, for overhearing by one-or-all).
So let us take up the glimmer of hope for a ‘personalised-community-interaction’ as being up for business as the secondary nature of the High Street;
and I ask:
OK, but do not replace the High Street by Pubs, Flicks, Pintable-Arcades, Bookies, Flats, Offices and mere Coffee-shops.
Surely human civilisation increasingly needs a positively-interactive scoiety, both mutual-self-healthing-&-sustainworthy-lifestyling,
and for participatorily-democratic or democratising enablements, information-sharing, cooperative- discussion, even cooperative problem-solving practices, sessions, meetings, and public-debates.
I can also ‘see’ a small range of community-interaction, citizenship-improvement, and neighbourhood centres, helping to build the much-needed Resilient Society that the whole woprld really needs now;
and a wider range of one-to-one remedial or ‘catch-up’ somatic-, emotional-, and mind-Health educationals, as well as small-group self-healthing education, practicums, and progressive lessons.
Yes, replace big departmental stores, even small material-items sales only shops by human-socialisation centres,
but let bus-handy supermarkets, cafes, and restaurants, be welcome but in support to the Community-Interaction new nature of the city-centre, and of the High Street.
Let ourmoded places be convberted to easy-socialising spaces, mainly I would envisage for easy dancing or response-able body-movement art, non-holding and possibly non-touch,
easy, relaxing, “body-language-friendly” and ‘low-impact’,
or simple individualised-expression, and mirrored-impression, health enhancing body-movement,
would all surely be participation-friendly for over 90% of the population.
That would be the social paradigmn and human-energy-positivisation quantum-shift we all need – in worldwide High Streets, surely ?
Baroness Murphy – we should get together and open a boutique in Westminster for baronesses of a certain age and figure!
I made a mistake with my calculation. £160 not £140 is the fee for an overdue ticket in the B&Q car park at Redditch.
B Deech/Murphy:
http://www.box2.co.uk/
Thanks!
I very much agree with Ian and Dan above who see little point into trying to recreate high streets of 20-30 years ago. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t exist, though.
What the internet can’t do is bring the ambience of a tea shop, the smell of a perfume, the stimulation of local museums and galleries, the charm of a well-stocked haberdashery or craft shop. Also, URLs can not compete with the transient variety and vibrancy offered by street vendors and street performers.
Local councils need to engage rather than moaning about cuts and setting rates only affordable to Starbucks and M&S.
“Struck a cord”
but alas! not a chord
nor yet accord
m’ladies.
You should get together, yesw; but with one or two male peers included (“man chases woman until she catches him” if need-be)
to open not yet another endlessly-ineffectual retail-therapy “boutique”,
but a personal holistic relaxation and strengthening ‘salon’
discreetly responsible mutual win-win-win participation included perhaps,
as the essential outcome of an an innovatively initial one-to-one holistic and sustainworthy health education ‘society’
(for some ‘members’ this might need to be sometimes preceded by one-to-one private impairment-remediation and hopefully reversal).
That would make sustainworthy sense !
Anything to get you able to carry a few vital-needs parcels to the nearest bus-stop, and thus be better showing the lower-fortunate rest of us some sustainworthy-lifestyle example to affordably-follow.
Now that really would be life-leadership, don’t you think ?
we should get together and open a boutique in Westminster for baronesses of a certain age and figure! 21 again.
Bookshops are especially vulnerable to this, having to stock say 5,000 titles only to suffer the indignity of the shopper to cheerily say they’ll order their choices from Amazon. Record shops – now of course selling CDs
They have merely mutated. I rather wish I had waited until February for the new Waterstone sony Ericsson E-reader, which will provide far better for the electronic readership than amazon which has a good many Us titles on its
booklists, top notch non theless.
HMV is running well with itunes(?), a much more economical way of running a Cd store!
doubt whether @Twm O’r Nant is right – planning officers are busy enough as it is to have any time to
My point is not their time, but their responsibility; they have to consider the change of use, and the need to keep the shopping centre well used, or the appearance of being well used.
It will be a long time before freehold owners of shops will consider reverting to residential use, with the much lower value that it would entail.
Country town centres are frequently owned by three or four large property owners, who would not be in the least bit satisfied with
reverting to the residential use of 100 years ago! Chichester may have a largish holding by the Church commission, in the centre, amongst other freehold owners.
Marylebone High st and St John’s Wood certainly don’t seem to be suffering from the town centre syndrome, but the population may be exponentially higher than it was 15 years ago. It is more of a country town problem.
The towns which are further from the regional distribution centres of the supermarkets/ chains stores have not yet got such fine pedestrian centres that most others do have by now, Chichester being a good example of the fineness. Those towns outside the circumference of the distrib centres, usually enjoy a very different kind of supermarket presence, on account of being less profitable.
The Coop Manchester makes certain that they are provided with as much presence as ethical retailing can possibly provide; it is the membership that matters and not so much the profit.
From the start, this whole discussion of high streets has been people continually moaning about cars and parking. I live in a small town where everyone must live within walking distance of the centre. Yet I see few people walking. I don’t have a car and manage to carry my groceries back from the supermarket, which is located in the centre of town. Unfortunately by the time I leave work, only the supermarket and Wilkinsons are open, but that’s another issue. Rarely do I want to buy something that it isn’t possible to carry. If I do, it’s likely to be something that wouldn’t be availably locally, so I would have to buy online anyway.
Local town centres are good for everyday consumables (or at least would be if they were open at a time that working people could visit the shops). There is never going to be the range or variety of more expensive, occasional goods (electricals, clothes) in a local high street, so going further afield or online will always be necessary. Huge amounts of parking shouldn’t be needed if people would rediscover that they have legs and can use them to get around. No wonder we are facing an obesity crisis! I say there should be no parking other than for disabled people.
Sadly the facts show that given the choice between an out of town supermarket with a car park and an in-town one without, the shoppers vote with their cars for the former. The walking shopper does not provide enough profit for the high street which therefore declines.
“I see few people walking. I don’t have a car and manage to carry my groceries back from the supermarket”
“no parking other than for disabled people.”
Try carrying a bag of cement 9 miles and have no use of one leg.
Ok I took the bus, but it was 2 miles to get the cement, strapped to my back, myself with crutches, even in the town centre.
In the age of DIY, quite a bit of shopping can NOT be done without a car, and getting the knowledge of delivery businesses, in the vicinity, takes some finding as well.
I’m all in favour of high charges for cars in town centres.
If you use the local roads, you should pay for them.
Swanage takes some beating. £6 for a couple of hours in the summer. How very taxing!
Quite a bit of shopping can NOT be done without a car – but the reality is that a significant proportion of households do not have access to a motor car and quite possibly could not afford to maintain one. Others, like myself, do not drive a car (were I to have one) owing to an eyesight disability. We will be left with a rump of shops whose bulk trade has been removed by out of town supermarkets etc and who therefore have to charge more for what left they sell.
Now come now Jonathan, I can tell you are a strapping lad who is not shopping for six or ten people. A weekend’s shop is too heavy for me to carry far and you aren’t shopping with toddlers in tow like many. The answer is surely that High Streets must have high profit margins on high end goods to attract the special occasion shopper or alternatively offer a completely different quality from that available in supermarkets. I suspect that’s why St John’s Wood and Marylebone High Streets work so well, and of course they have a local resident population of wealthy folk. My little town of Harleston in Norfolk works well because the quality of the butchers and greengrocer is far superior to anything the supermarket can offer, because the parking is very near and because the supermarket is an integral part of the town centre so hasn’t destroyed the smaller specialist shops. Planners in Harleston have done an excellent job, whereas in nearby Diss, supermarkets are away from the main town and have killed the centre almost completely except on market day.
The new Deech and Murphy Boutique for Right Sized Baronesses will be opening on the Principal floor of the Lords any day soon (the Printed Paper Office would be a convenient location, we may have to move them).
Happy Christmas.
I can’t wait! Impossible to buy useful things like aspirins or tights in Westminster without going at least as far as the station.
“have high profit margins on high end goods to attract the special occasion shopper or alternatively offer a completely different quality from that available in supermarkets.”
The main excuse for out of town shopping was the CAR, and non pedestrianisation.
It is surprising how, now that the other supermarkets are doing what the Coop did 80 years ago, namely door to door delivery, the brand named chains like Londis and Spar open up in most unusual places, where a large quantity of people walk past, but which Sains/Tes/As vacated 20 years ago.
The “quality” of produce of those small outlet chains is certainly not as good as huge supermarkets, with mass parking outside, but they are far more concerned with
“fast” or “casual” items such as crisps,Pop, heavily saturated fats.
Not to be outdone, but to outdo, the big boys have also reversed backwards in to the small shop trade.
That is groceries, but with hardware, garden items, there are now supermarkets which undercut the old style ironmonger, one of the few trades which has held on in the high street by giving useful and specialist advice to DIYers for example along with the item sold.
They can do the undercutting by buying in bulk in SE Asia for pennies, whereas the old style shop is still buying from what now seems to be overpriced European/German produce.
You can get stuff in one part of the street for 1/10th the price of that in another, with only the smallest loss, of what the Baroness describes as “Quality”.
The most cunning retail ploy I know of, is the Coop who sell 2for£1, but you invariably only want one, so you take one, assuming it will be 50p. No such luck.
Two cost £1, BUT 1 also costs £1 !!!
Now that is hard headed business!(at the Coop,mind!)
We offered you one free but you did not take it! That is your bad luck!
The commoditisation of all vegetables beneath glossy lighting and fancy packages, must be very damaging to the tastebuds and the general health of all their customers.
At least we can get fresh organic olives from the Baroness Olive groves in Italy, pure unwashed!
My local city centre will charge me £1.80 for the privilege of parking there for an hour at lunchtime, and that’s before I’ve done any business. I can walk from work (where I can still park for free), but that’s 20 minutes each way, leaving not much time for anything else.
There happens to be a large Tesco within easy walking distance of work, and an Asda a few minutes further on. As such, I rarely visit the city centre, simply because it’s not cost-effective.
The ideal place for a high price single item purchases shop would be in the middle of Portcullis house.
The space there is drastically underused, (whereas the committee rooms upstairs seem to be vastly overused sometimes, going by the crowds queueing to get in October/November),
There is a captive market of 824+650+staff
regularly using the vicinity, who must certainly need items for which they have to go as far as Baroness Deech in quest of tights.
That space is so drastically underused that it might be a good idea to enquire of the designer/architect whether it was his intention to leave space for later internal development,for such purposes.
The security of bringing in vast quantities of produce would be non viable but for selected items it would be no different from security inside the check in area of an airport concourse.
That is surely the answer to Baroness Deech’s prayers for instant Tights.
If they can manage to get all that gunpowder into Parliament and detonate it for the New Year fireworks, getting a few packets of tights in ought to be trivial.
All that gunpowder into Parliament and just to detonate it for the New Year fireworks. Misplaced priorities in my opinion, and that of several million around the country I dare say. For one thing it should have been detonated in the cellars.
I did raise the subject of security, but I Attended a meeting at the Grand Hotel Brighton some years ago, and decided not to mention the subject again.
The atrium is splendid if not downright decadent and could well be put to good use as
boutique shops.
The space would always be available for proper parliamentary use, as say, temporary Chamber while another is rebuilt in keeping with modern democracies. and so on.