This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Father Christmas didn’t come to Tranquil Vale last year. For more than a decade, the children’s shoe shop in Blackheath had a life-size model of Santa sitting in the window. His appearance in south London at the start of Advent, bearing an amiable resemblance to Kenny Rogers, was one of those landmarks of the passing year, like the first daffodils outside All Saints’ Church or the arrival of the Easter funfair on the patch of Heath known historically as Washerwoman’s Bottom.
No more. The last Christmas Eve procession, as 1,500 people walked with a brass band and donkey from St Mary’s at the top of the village down the Vale to sing carols on the Heath outside All Saints’, passed by a long-empty premises. All that was in the window were dust and dead spiders.
One of the most prominent shopfronts in the village, at a corner where the traffic slows and splits, has been closed for more than a year. The 18th century building now looks tatty and derelict with peeling paint, a cracked window pane and signs saying “Protected by Live-In Guardians”. The last word is in the same font as the masthead of the newspaper, which does not give much hope of them fighting off intruders.
At the opposite end of the small square that forms Blackheath’s heart, a sign outside JoJo Maman Bébé announces that the maternity and children’s clothes shop will close at the end of March. The chain was bought by Next in 2022 and has been shutting branches in other well-heeled areas, but the departure of two children’s outfitters within 50 yards of each other in an affluent London village, where family homes start at £1 million, may speak to a demographic shift. The local state primary schools have experienced falling rolls as families move (or are priced out of) the area, and now the VAT rise is hitting the private schools.
These are not the only empty units. There now seem to be as many gaps in the village as there are in a young child’s row of teeth. A few doors down from JoJo, the women’s fashion store Whistles will close soon; next to it Mordens wine bar has sat empty for two years. An independent opticians near the shoe shop went recently, whilst a crafts shop on the opposite side of the square is having a closing-down sale. A minute’s walk away, the flower shop that stood near the station for 50 years closed last summer. There is no sign of a new tenant.
There may be many reasons for closing — falling custom, rising rents, rates and staffing costs, or simply retirement in the case of Michael Shakespeare, a violin-maker and restorer, whose fading, peeling sign for his workshop (now removed) on an alley off the Vale always looked as if it had been there since Menuhin was a lad — but when a shop goes and isn’t quickly replaced, it creates a sense of decay. I walk up to the main commercial estate agents to seek an explanation, only to find a sign in the window saying that they too have closed.
Perhaps the saddest departure is the farewell message made from large individual letters in the bright yellow-framed Georgian bay window of what had been Blackheath Creatives. “Au Revoir,” it said, for this is an area that is proudly European. For years, Khan’s Indian restaurant a few doors away had a prominent sign in the window announcing “Wir haben auch die Speisekarte in Deutsch” in case there was anyone over from Frankfurt and feeling peckish for a lamb bhuna.
It was perhaps also a reference to the cod-French restaurant that used to be there. Café Rouge, another once-familiar chain that is almost extinct, left Blackheath after 13 years in 2020. In an admirable piece of post-Covid community service, the space was offered by the Dyers’ Company, the landlords, to a group of artists on a pop-up basis for a couple of months. They stayed for three years.
Gradually, it grew into a collective of 122 independent creative retailers, spreading into the former kitchen and garden, with a café, vintage trail, open-mic nights and music festival. It was a bright, energetic part of Blackheath. Now it has gone.
“You can still find us online,” says a small sign in the window. Perhaps that is part of why so many shops are now closing: we live our lives too much online. Why go out to a physical shop and speak to a real human about the pride they take in their business, when you can purchase on a whim with a couple of clicks?
That is not to say that all of Blackheath is closing down. Shepherd’s grocery store, one of those Aladdin’s Cave places that you can always rely on when you need lobster bisque on the way home, has existed since the 1960s. The butcher’s by the station, which has sold meat on the site for more than a century, has gone up another gear since the admirably old-school John Charles handed over the cleaver after 30 years to Nick Ellis. At least Ellis doesn’t ban card payments.
On the other side of the station, Madeleine’s, a creperie and ice cream parlour, has established itself in a few years as a place to treat children after school on the site of a delicatessen. Inside, it displays an original advert found during the refurbishment for “Cheesemonger and Porkman” — my kind of superheroes.
The Blackheath Bookshop is busy, though it is independent only in branding. It hides the fact it is a Waterstones well. Whilst that gets most of the trade, the second-hand Bookshop on the Heath, with its Cambridge Blue paintwork, has held the corner where Tranquil Vale meets Royal Parade since 1949 and still somehow remains in business.
Some of that is down to this magazine’s columnist, Marcus Walker, who I once took for a long boozy lunch in the Argentinian restaurant next door that involved five steaks and two bottles of Malbec. Fortified, he stumbled into the bookshop and emerged with all 13 volumes of The Oxford History of England, which the Rector of Great St Barts just had to buy.
The bookshop still tries to meet those strange antiquarian urges. A message in the window addressed to “the lovely couple” lets them know, should they pass by again, that the owner has now found the four-volume red-cloth Life and Times of Queen Victoria they had been after. I hope they return to buy them, for the shop assistant admits that business is patchy. At least the shop is still there, after 76 years and counting. She gestures at all the empty shops down the hill and sighs. “I fear that we are sleepwalking into becoming a ghost village,” she says, sadly.
The problem is what replaces them, though I was relieved to discover that Goldex Ladies Only, which is moving into the site of a once popular restaurant, is a women’s gym not, as the name implied, a lap dancing club. When Raffles, an eccentric men’s fashion shop, closed in 2020 after 22 years in Blackheath, it was replaced by a convenience store with an array of wine bottles and hipflask-sized spirits in the window, some of which get drunk and smashed outside the church.
A planning application was posted last September outside the old Lloyds Bank, empty since 2020, seeking extended licensing hours for an Asda Express. So far, the building remains locked and deteriorating. Another application in the shoe shop window says it is the target of a Sainsbury’s Local. Londis are said to be in talks to buy the old flower shop. Locals wonder why we need so many different places to get booze and ready meals, none of which seem very, if you excuse the snobbery, “Blackheath”. I bet they won’t sell lobster bisque.
The problem, of course, is that these sort of large chains, mainly selling quick-purchase food and drink, are the only ones who can survive in this economy — them and charity shops, which get favourable rates. Last year, some 13,500 retail stores closed in Britain — about 37 a day — and 84 per cent of them were independent shops. The Centre for Retail Research expects the number to rise to 17,350 this year. The cut in the business rates discount from 75 to 40 per cent in April, and the rise in employer NICs, will be the final nail in the coffin.
I write about Blackheath because it has been my home for more than 20 years, but this is not a unique picture. It is a snapshot of a national malaise. High streets have been dying for years, but when even affluent areas start to have long-term gaps in their shop-scape, I fear for the permanent destruction of something that should feel very special even in an online age: a real-life vibrant community of independent shopkeepers.
We need to preserve it by using it and by demanding help for local business. In the area of London where Wat Tyler once pitched camp to protest against taxation, we should make our dismay known to government, even if rioting is no longer our thing. Call it the pleasants’ revolt.
“I thought it would last my time,” Larkin wrote in “Going, Going”. “It seems, just now, to be happening so very fast … for the first time I feel somehow that it isn’t going to last.” And that, as the poet said, will be England gone.
