Rant Quentin Letts

MY newspaper wanted one of those get-fit features: wheezy hack tries exercise regime. This meant buying PE kit for the first time since college. Where to go in London? I tried Lillywhites on Piccadilly Circus.

On childhood trips to the capital we would go to Lillywhites, my mother saying it was the best sports shop in the world. It was an emporium to rival Harrods or Fortnum’s. Lillywhites embodied the nobility of sport.

It had five storeys of airy sales-floors, a fine staircase and assistants who wore suits and knew about Gilbert rugger boots and Slazenger tennis racquets. Aged ten, I admired a line of cricket bats: Gunn & Moore, County, Duncan Fearnley. The salesman let me try them all for weight and even gave me tips about getting my foot to the ball.

Lillywhites today is part of the business empire of budget-sportsgear tycoon Mike Ashley. What a dive. It is so overstuffed by cheap clothes, there is barely room to move. The staff look miserable and can barely speak English. Gaudy adverts promote discounts. Music blares. The lift smells of farts. Tourists push dolefully through tiny aisles. Sport as an ideal, as Corinthian endeavour? Hardly.

I asked to try on some gym shoes. An assistant in exercise pants grunted into a walkie-talkie and a surly woman later arrived from a storeroom. I was left to try on the shoes without advice. On my way to the tills (where two men were trying to haggle with a Slavic salesgirl and her gum-chewing line manager) I just avoided being gored by a man with a pole. He was using it to retrieve coat hangers from a high rack.

I did not want the shoe box. The till operator said: ‘Nah, you have to take it. We’re not allowed to keep them.’ Mike Ashley may have made millions but he has impoverished our capital and made Lillywhites a frightful dump.