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Greenwich news and information

So Organic closes Greenwich shop

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So Organic, Greenwich

A SHOP in Greenwich town centre that specialises in organic skincare products has closed down.

So Organic in Nelson Road shut its doors at the weekend and the owners plan to reopen the shop in Lincoln instead.

Chief Operating Officer, Stuart Burlton, told Greenwich.co.uk that the closure was because of the “reduction in customer footfall in the area, and the knock on effect this has had on retail sales.”

He added, “We leave behind a group of excellent and loyal employees, a beautiful shop, loyal customer base and, to be fair, a supportive landlord in Greenwich Hospital.”

The increase in the cost of parking in Greenwich town centre is one factor that So Organic’s owners believe has put shoppers off visiting Greenwich.

Customers with treatment room vouchers will receive a refund on application, either in full or in part if bought as part of a series of vouchers, depending on how many they had used as a proportion of the overall. Customers will also have the choice to exchange them for product vouchers on So Organic’s website, which continues to trade as normal.

Andrew Gilligan: Small Shops Under New Threat As Sainsbury’s Comes To Town

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Greenwich town centre is to get a new Sainsbury’s supermarket, triggering a potential new threat to the town’s remaining independent shops.

The motorbike accessories store in the same Greenwich High Road block as the existing Co-op is closing down. On its windows are statutory notices announcing that Sainsbury’s is applying for an alcohol licence for the premises. The new store – about the same size as the Co-op by the looks of the site – will be the third new supermarket chain to open in recent years, after the M&S Simply Food at the Cutty Sark and the Tesco Metro on Trafalgar Road.

The post-Tesco fate of the other shops on Trafalgar Road – closure for some, reduced business for many – could be a worrying portent of the future. The new Sainsbury’s will be within a minute’s walk of Greenwich’s main cluster of independent food shops – the greengrocer, butcher, cheese shop, fishmonger and general grocery on Royal Hill.

True, these places have managed to cope with the Co-op, for years. But Sainsbury’s stock is likely be more directly competitive with them – more fresh food, more bourgeois comforts and more upmarket stuff than the Co-op – meaning that it’s a more serious threat.

And the competition between the two neighbouring supermarkets may also (temporarily) drive down prices on the basics and staples to an extent which damages Royal Hill. I found last year that the prices of the Royal Hill shops were suprisingly competitive with the Co-op (then Somerfield). If both of the retail behemoths are prepared to sell things at a loss as they battle it out, however, it seems unlikely that the smaller players will be able to compete on price. That could do them great damage.

At the same time, perhaps the most consuming retail issue in Greenwich – the fate of the market – is about to come to a head. Planning permission for Greenwich Hospital’s hateful scheme to knock down the market was refused exactly a year ago. But the Hospital’s appeal against the decision will be heard by a planning inspector at a public inquiry between September 7th and 17th.

Greenwich Hospital’s changes to the scheme – principally keeping, though reglazing, the roof – don’t seem to have convinced anyone. The existing shops will still be demolished and the number of stalls, and the food court, reduced. The site will be dominated by a 100-bedroom hotel.

On Sunday, as we covered on the site, there was a demo against the plans, with the three local councillors handing out leaflets claiming that even the revised proposals “will see the end of Greenwich Market as we know it.” This is true – because the cost of the redevelopment will almost certainly mean that the Hospital will have to raise the rents to a level beyond that which the existing independent traders can afford. Hays Galleria or Spitalfields, next stop!

The cynical view is that the tourists won’t be able to tell the difference. But of course they will – and we most certainly will. The market was so rammed this weekend that, to the rage of passing motorists, the demonstrators had to stand in the road. If it’s turned into a feeble appendage of a 100-room hotel, with added chain-stores, it won’t be anything like as much of a draw to the town.

As well as the local councillors, the influential Commission on Architecture and the Built Environment – the Government’s design standards watchdog- has attacked the revised scheme. In their response to the planning inspector, CABE said the new plans were still ‘alien.” They criticised the proposed layout of the market, the ‘dominating’ scale of the boutique hotel and the detailing of the glazed roof.

They branded as “awkward” the proposed new route from Greenwich Church Street into the market. And they said that the relationship between the roof and the proposed new buildings on either side was still not “fully resolved.”

I’ll be covering the saga of the market and the public inquiry in more detail within the next two weeks. But we should look at the onward march of the supermarkets – a Waitrose and a further Tesco are also rumoured – with just as much alarm.

New flower shop blooms on Trafalgar Road

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Mike Catterall Floral Designs

A brand new florist has opened for business in Trafalgar Road, Greenwich.

Mike Catterall Floral Designs had its grand opening over the weekend and welcomed customers with a glass of champagne.

Mike, who has twenty years experience as a florist, told Greenwich.co.uk a little about how the new shop came about:

I moved to London eight years ago, and would always come to Greenwich at the weekends and decided I really wanted to live here. It was when I was looking for somewhere to live here that I found the shop at the same time and it all fell together very quickly.

The shop will be open seven days a week and Mike even intends to open on Christmas Day for those customers who need a very last minute bouquet.

The new business caters for all floral requirements but Mike tells me most of his intricate work is for funerals and has included a pint of beer, a cup and saucer, Nemo the fish from ‘Finding Nemo’ and even a pair of Dorothy’s shoes from ‘The Wizard of Oz’.

Mike Catterall Floral Designs is at 93 Trafalgar Road.

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Mike Catterall

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Andrew Gilligan: Where have all the shops gone?

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HAVE you noticed how many empty shops there are in Greenwich, all of a sudden? In the town centre (excluding Royal Hill) there are 19. The shop that was Warwick Leadlay, at the entrance passage from Nelson Road to the market, is the latest to fall vacant – for the second time in two years.

The only thing in the shop now is a notice in the window from its most recent tenant, Graham and Green, announcing that they have relocated to Notting Hill. That could stand as an epitaph for the folly of Greenwich Hospital’s retail strategy. They elbowed out a business, Warwick Leadlay, that had provided decades of stability on the retail scene, to bring in a trendy outlet that fled back to its comfort zone as soon as it realised that SE10 is not, thank God, Notting Hill.

Around the market, nearly half a dozen shops are vacant. Next to the Post Office, the big Bottoms Up site has been empty for months. The parade at the Greenwich end of South Street now has two vacant shops. The clothing shop in King William Walk has closed. Two of Frank Dowling’s pubs and bars, the old Cricketers (aka the Lani Tiki Lounge) and the Inc Bar above the market arch, are dry. The travel agency near the DLR station has flown away.

Some of it, no doubt, is because of the recession. Some of it is because of Greenwich Hospital’s wish to redevelop the central Market site. It is gradually moving traders out of the bits it wants to demolish, to boost its loathsome scheme to turn the Market into a hotel with a modern shopping precinct attached – unanimously rejected by the council last year, but the subject of an appeal and public inquiry this summer. More on this soon.

Some of it, though, may be because Greenwich shops depend on visitors, and it is simply not an attractive place to visit at the moment. This used to be somewhere that visitors (if not locals) came to shop. But as well as the shops, we have of course lost about three-quarters of our markets. I am increasingly struck by how hugely disappointing the town must now feel for those visitors who can remember it from a few years ago.

The dominant feature of central Greenwich has become a series of hoardings concealing, variously, a mutton-headed tarting-up (the foot tunnel), a national tragedy (the appallingly botched restoration of the Cutty Sark), a vaguely unneccesary “improvement” (the Sammy Ofer wing at the Maritime Museum), an endlessly-delayed project (the pier) or a supposed future university, currently and almost certainly now indefinitely an empty space (the old Village Market site.) And that’s before the Olympics get started…

As the new government starts to wield the axe, the assumption in many quarters seems to be that all public spending is good and that any cuts to it are bad. Much of the time this is, of course, true. But Greenwich increasingly strikes me as a textbook example of just how destructive public spending and official improvement-mania can be. We would have almost certainly have been happier, and our town would have been busier, if they had just forgotten about thir grand plans and left the pier, the foot tunnel, the Cutty Sark, the Maritime Museum, the park and the Village Market alone.

Maplin to open new store at Greenwich Shopping Park

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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

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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

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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, 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 , 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

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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

New Look Opens Greenwich Store

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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.