Maplin to open new store at Greenwich Shopping Park

Electronics retailer, Maplin, is to open a new branch next Saturday (19th December) at the Greenwich Shopping Park off Bugsby’s Way.

The new branch will be Maplin’s 170th store, and will occupy the final unit at the retail park.

Maplin’s store manager, Phil Jarrett, who will open the store, explained: “We’re delighted to be opening a store at Greenwich Shopping Park and it’s great that we are able to open our doors just in time for the final push for Christmas, when shoppers will be looking to get the best electronic gifts on the market this Christmas.”

You can see the range of products they stock by visiting the Maplin website.

Shop Closures

Elsewhere in Greenwich, there have been a couple of shop closures.

The off licence on Greenwich High Road, Bottoms Up, has closed down after its parent company, First Quench Retailing Limited, went into administration.  In King William Walk, Revolutionz – the ski and skate wear shop – has also closed down. The company is still trading online and with a branch in Norwich, so visit their website if you need to speak to them about any returns or warranty questions.

Continental Market Coming to Greenwich in September

A Continental Village Market will be setting up stall in Greenwich next month allowing shoppers to get a taste of produce from countries all over Europe.

The traders will be bringing with them French cheeses, charcuterie, Greek olives and tapenades, dried nuts and fruit as well as Turkish pastries will be just some of the delicacies on offer. Hot foods will include German spicy sausages, Spanish paella and Brittany crepes while other items such as wooden toys, little gifts and jewellery from Paris, lavender oils, soaps and table cloths from Provence, will also be on offer.

The market will be in Cutty Sark Gardens on Friday 4th September and Saturday 5th September from 10am – 6pm, before moving on to Eltham at Passey Place on Sunday 6th September from 10am – 4pm.

Andrew Gilligan: Progress Report

THIS COLUMN has been going for just under six months, and there’s already been a bit of progress on some of the topics I’ve been banging on about in that time. I definitely wouldn’t claim credit – but perhaps in one or two cases, the publicity helped push things along a little.

One of my very first pieces, in October, attacked the “drift and decay” in Greenwich’s flagship shopping street, Nelson Road, with four shops empty and a general air of neglect. Three of the empty shops have now been filled, and not with chains either – not bad going in a recession – and the street has a perkier feel.

In February we pointed out the equally recession-salient fact that the small food shops of Greenwich were both cheaper, and offerered better quality food, than our main supermarket, Somerfield.

Now Dring’s the butchers in Royal Hill, one of the shops I mentioned, tells me that it has been shortlisted as “Best Local Shop” in the ITV London/ Smooth Radio Love London Awards. Congratulations, guys: thoroughly well deserved – I bought some chicken from Dring’s the other day and it was ace. Best of luck for the awards ceremony at the Cafe de Paris on 24 April.

Earlier this week, Boris Johnson announced that the Thames Clipper river service would take Oyster pay-as-you-go from November, something for which I campaigned in this space in February. Later this year, this column, my newspaper the Standard, a major think-tank and a number of key political figures in London will be making a great deal more noise about how to improve the riverbus: watch this space.

The biggest result against the forces of folly, though, has been in helping get TfL’s grotesque “Greenwich Waterfront Transit” completely cancelled, something which happened last week. As I wrote in November,  this scheme sounded impressive – but was in fact nothing more than the world’s most expensive bus route.

It would simply have replaced the existing 472 service from North Greenwich to Thamesmead, using the same sort of rubber-tyred diesel buses, running at the exactly same frequency, and along almost exactly the same route and roads. (There would have been a tiny amount of new bus-only road in the Woolwich Arsenal development and in Western Way, near Belmarsh.)

It was the rest of us who would have noticed the difference. The GWT was expected to cost £20 million – absurd enough for a scheme offering no real new benefits beyond a fancy name. By this year, however, the cost had risen to £46 million – more than the entire annual bus subsidy for the whole of Wales!

The cancellation caused some predictable gibbering from the kind of people who still can’t accept that they no longer live in the golden days of economic boom and Ken Livingstone, with great tides of dosh lapping around to be flung at any pointless vanity project that shines in the light.

GWT’s demise left the people of the east of the borough “again bereft of an adequate transport network,” stormed Chris Roberts, Labour leader of Greenwich Council. “At a time when the Government is quite rightly looking for infrastructure projects to support the economy and keep people in work, the Mayor of London is cancelling them.”

One person Roberts’ furious denunciations understandably neglected to mention was the local MP, Nick Raynsford – also Labour – who said last year that he was dropping his support for the scheme because “I no longer consider it justifying the substantial costs involved.”

Raynsford is right. The GWT was in fact a conscious and gigantic con-trick on the long-suffering people of Thamesmead – deceiving them that they were getting, in Roberts’ words, a new “transport network” or “infrastructure project” when in fact they were getting neither of those things.

It would actually have reduced the chances of Thamesmead getting the real transport “infrastructure project” it needs, a tram or rail link, because the bureaucrats would have been able to wave the existence of GWT in the faces of anyone who asked.

So for the sake not just of taxpayer value but of the transport needs of the east of the borough, we should celebrate GWT’s demise this week.

Cycles UK Opens in Creek Road

New bike shop, Cycles UK, opened for business in Creek Road on Saturday morning. The new branch is intended to be the flagship store for the independent chain, and will stock bikes and accessories from leading brands such as Specialized, Marin, Trek, Wilier and Cube.

The opening was nearly derailed by the recent break-in and theft of eight cycles, but thankfully everything went ahead as scheduled.

On Thursday night, local cyclists were invited down to an “open night” to see what the shop had to offer and enjoy a drink and a chat with the staff. Peter Skelton from Cycles UK tells me that the store’s dedicated women’s cycling area received particular praise from the female cyclists in attendance.

Related Link: Hybrid Bike

Vodafone Fonehouse Coming to Greenwich

Opponents of indentikit towns may be further disheartened by the news that a new Fonehouse franchise dedicated to Vodafone will be opening up in Greenwich.  Fonehouse, of course, already has a branch in Greenwich Church Street, and it’s not yet been confirmed where this new Vodafone specific store will be.

Do you welcome the arrival of another mobile phone shop in Greenwich?

New Look Opens Greenwich Store

Fashion retailer, New Look, has opened a new store at the Greenwich Peninsular Retail Park off Bugsby’s Way.

Having started in 1969, New Look is one of the largest clothes shop chains in the UK and has a total of 590 branches internationally.  Whilst other clothing retailers have suffered in the downturn, New Look seems to be doing quite well, recently boasting of an increase in sales which its chief executive, Carl McPhail, attributes to its “core fashion and value credentials”.

The new Greenwich branch opened for business on Thursday 12th March. Find out more at www.newlook.co.uk

Hat tip to the Greenwich Gazette for spotting the opening.

New Bike Shop Coming To Greenwich

A new bike shop will be opening up in Creek Road in the first week of April. Cycles UK, an independent chain with 16 branches around the South East, will be opening up for business on the 4th April and will be stocking a wide selection of brands including Specialized, Trek, Marin, Wilier, Cube and Pashley alongside a great range of kids & BMX bikes, clothing and accessories.

They are also planning a pilot programme to offer courtesy bikes to customers whilst their own bikes are being serviced or repaired. Cycles UK is actively encouraging feedback from cyclists about what they would like from the shop, so if you have any comments, check out their new blog which shows progress with the store as it nears completion.

Andrew Gilligan: Small Shops Are Cheaper

“BABY: nothing yet,” declared the blackboard outside Dring’s butchers in Royal Hill this afternoon. For me, it said it all about how local shops, local shopkeepers – and their families – give something to a community that supermarkets never can.
 
One of the most popular things my newspaper, the Standard, has ever done (apart from helping to stiff Ken Livingstone) is its campaign to save small shops – and Greenwich is amazingly lucky to have somehow held on to many of the sorts of shops that have been swept away elsewhere in London. They’re part of the lifeblood of the area. Their stock is more interesting, they do less damage to the environment and the money we spend in them goes back into our area, not into corporate shareholders’ pockets and tax shelters in the Cayman Islands.
 
Yet the one killer argument for small shops we never thought to make – the one we simply assumed wasn’t true – is in fact true. In Greenwich at least, small shops are often cheaper.
 
We’ve all been conditioned to believe that supermarkets offer value for money. That was, of course, their proposition when they started up: pile it high, sell it cheap. But now that they control three-quarters of the grocery market, things are a little different.
 
Yesterday and today, on your behalf, I spent a couple of hours comparing the prices for groceries at my nearest supermarket – Somerfield, in Greenwich High Road – with those in my nearest collection of small shops – those on Royal Hill. I admit to being surprised by the results.
 
The small shops, as you might expect, offered produce better or equal to the supermarket’s. But they were also remarkably competitive on price. In around half the cases, they were cheaper; most of the rest of the time, they were within a few pence.
 
On fish and meat, the quality and choice at Drings and the Fishmonger (round the corner in Circus Street) was far higher than at Somerfield, but the prices mostly lower. Free range lamb chops at Drings were £5.99 per pound. Non free-range lamb chops in a sad plastic box at Somerfield were £15.40 a kilo (£6.98 per pound.) Free-range pork chops were £2.99 per pound at Drings. At Somerfield: £4.89 per kilo (£2.21 per pound), for non free-range in a plastic box.
 
Somerfield barely seems to have any fish at all, but the one comparator I did find – mackerel, again in a little plastic box, was £9.84 a kilo at Somerfield against £6.99 a kilo for fresh mackerel at the Fishmonger.
 
Supermarkets have scored in the meat stakes with pre-prepared ready meals, but Drings caters for this market too. It has a rosemary and garlic chicken breast for £2.15 and a thyme and garlic chicken thigh for 75p – both substantially cheaper than their closest equivalents in Greenwich’s ready-meal king, M&S.
 
On fruit and vegetables, the Creaky Shed in Royal Hill charged 20p for an orange (Somerfield 32p), 25p for a lemon (36p), and 39p for a pound of cooking onions (Somerfield 45p). The small shop was more expensive on grapefruit (50p to 46p), apples (30p to 9p), and potatoes (88p/lb, Somerfield 45p).
 
On eggs and packaged groceries, the Royal Hill mini-market again beat Somerfield on most prices, and came very close on others. The list (compared yesterday):

	Mini Market	Somerfield
Cheapest free range eggs x 6	£1.20	£1.59
Coke 2 litres	£1.71	£1.86
Persil non-bio powder std box	£2.89	£3.23
Head and Shoulders Classic Clean	£3.99 for 500ml	£2.26 for 200ml
Kellogg’s Cornflakes 500g	£1.89	£1.89
Jaffa cake bars x 5	£1.49	£1.64
Cheapest white sliced bread	95p	76p
Pint of Milk	50p	46p
Fairy Liquid 500ml	£1.49	£1.16

Now it is true that Somerfield, the only general supermarket in central Greenwich, may to some degree be exploiting its position. Most prices at my closest large store, Tesco in Lewisham, beat the local shops – though even then, not by very much at all, and there are still some goods that are cheaper in Royal Hill. When you add in the cost of petrol, parking and time, the difference amounts to very little indeed.
 
So the question arises: why do we blindly flock to supermarkets, with all their queues, when it would be quicker and often cheaper to use small shops? Partly that false perception that they are better value. Partly habit. Partly, perhaps, their general shininess. We are greater suckers than we’d like to admit for bright lights and polished metal surfaces. And it is true, too, that though the supermarkets fall down on the quality of their fresh foods, like fruit, meat and fish, they offer a much wider choice of enticingly-packaged snacks and junk.
 
All of these are simply terrible reasons for choosing supermarkets. But what my little survey suggests is that Greenwich customers aren’t, yet, as price-sensitive as they should be. People just chuck things into their trolleys or baskets without noticing what they cost. As the economy slides, however, more people will be looking at the ticket on the shelf.
 
The small shops could, I think, do more to woo us. They could take credit cards; not all do at present. With the honourable exception of the Royal Hill mini-market (daily till 10), they could open later – the butcher’s started putting away its stock today soon after 4.30. Some of them could do with a better range; the selection of goods in the minimarket is quite downmarket for this area, though to be fair the supermarkets have sweetheart deals to  monopolise some of the best brands.
 
Above all, though, they need to find some way of making us aware of the fact that they actually offer extremely good value for money.

Daily Photo 07/01/09: Closed Shops

Rough Shopping

SOME PEOPLE in my road resent the endless tide of leaflets that washes through our letterboxes, and keep special bins by the door to put them straight in. Me, I chuck the pizza menus away – but I do enjoy laughing at the various local PR publications that slither on to our mat.

My top favourite is of course Greenwich Time, the council’s ridiculous propaganda newspaper – still doggedly insisting that putting the Olympic equestrian events in the Park will “transform” the sporting prospects of the borough’s kids, with a horse in every council flat.

But I’ve also got a real fondness for our two glossy local free magazines, Meridian and The Guide, with their articles by estate agents (“contrary to the doomsayers, the market remains surprisingly buoyant”) and glowing reviews of bad restaurants (“my companion’s garlic bread was delicious.”)

This month, inevitably, they’re both full of Christmas shopping baloney – Anthea Turner’s Yuletide organisational tips, that sort of thing – although I’m afraid Meridian has slipped up a bit. “With the twinkle of Christmas lights, the golden glow from the shops and the bustle of excited shoppers, Blackheath Village looks magical and very Christmassy at the moment,” writes Nanette Fielding on page 16 of the latest issue.

Alas, the magazine containing this charming description of Blackheath Village came through my door on December 3rd – in other words, three days before the Blackheath Christmas lights were switched on.

I, too, started my Christmas shopping even more prematurely than Nanette started writing her PR puff, though not yet at any of the chi-chi outlets advertised in Meridian or The Guide. No, I’ve been to – ahem – TK Maxx at the Peninsular Retail Park, Charlton.

Like some ultra-respectable Cabinet Minister secretly drawn to rough sex, I always feel, as a certified member of the West Greenwich bourgeoisie and campaigner for small shops, slightly guilty about my outbreaks of rough shopping. For the Charlton Peninsular Retail Park could not be further from the platonic middle-class shopping ideal.

As you probably know, it’s basically a strip-mall, a dozen big-box outlets strewn around a chaotic car park without any pretence of design, civic amenity or indeed anything other than the naked maximisation of profit. You won’t see Christmas lights, twinkling or otherwise, here – Christmas lights cost money.

My ex-colleague, the retail design guru Mary Portas, has brilliantly expressed her total contempt for TK Maxx, with its higgledy-piggledy racks of T-shirts and complete lack of style, display or taste. She is, of course, right – but I confess that that’s what I like about it. I’ve always enjoyed rummaging through street markets, and TK Maxx is a bit like a street market with a roof on.

Just like a street market, there is, these days, a fascinating mix of people. Most of the customers once seemed to be Poles and Lithuanians, plus a sprinkling of eccentrics like myself, but now they have been joined by a certain quota of credit-crunch refugees.

Just like a street market, most of the shopping niceties are missing. There are very few mirrors. There are supposed to be changing rooms, but whenever I go they always seem to be shut. So if you are trying on a shirt you do sometimes find yourself doing it in the middle of the shop (this only works for men, obviously.)

While doing this, rule number one at TK Maxx is to keep track of where you have put the clothes you came in wearing. The place is so chaotic that last time I was in there, someone picked my North Face jacket off the rack where I’d dumped it and took it to the till to pay.

Rule number two is that when you are looking through what actually is for sale, look everywhere. As in normal shops, they are supposed to sort the stuff by size and category – but the size labels always seem totally random and there are so many people going through the clothes that lots of things get put back in the wrong places.

The only strategy is to treat the job like, say, the Parachute Regiment clearing an enemy trench – methodically hose down each aisle, one at a time, until you are sure there are no cut-price Adidas T-shirts left alive.

Also rather like a combat zone, you have to block out the ceaseless aural shellfire from TK Maxx staff making announcements to each other over the in-store Tannoy (the Lewisham store seems much worse than Charlton, for some reason). Then, of course, there’s the 20-minute wait at the till.

If you can overcome these obstacles, however, the actual merchandise can be quite good. Much of the stuff is quite well-known brands – though often, admittedly, failed experiments by those brands which have bumped up against the limits of even British taste (I saw a pair of Puma trainers my size: the only problem was that they were in bright lime-green camouflage stripes, presumably so the wearer could take up a position in a tub of guacamole and not be noticed.)

If you are patient enough, you will usually come out with some small and quite acceptable, if not quite the very latest-model, designer trophy for yourself or a loved one: a Calvin Klein shirt or a Ted Baker jacket, perhaps, and for about half of what it might cost new. But I’ll be back in Blackheath Village next weekend: rough shopping is fun, but like rough sex, it’s a quick date, not a love affair.

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