There’s no such thing as a village when you live in a city
There is big drama in Belsize Park, a “village” on a hill in north London. I didn’t think that a city could actually contain a village, being a city and all, but apparently I am wrong.
The Co-op, in its apparent infinite evil, wants to open a shop there and local traders have condemned it.
Meanwhile, Janet Suzman, the former RSC actress, has begged it to desist because it would sully the area with deliveries and put other shops out of business.
I lived further up the hill in Hampstead “village” for a decade, and saw similar wars. The funniest was the outcry against a prospective McDonald’s, which only stopped when McDonald’s agreed to disguise itself as an artisanal bakery. (It is long since gone, to be replaced by an artisanal sandwich shop.)
Even so, I have no patience with people who live in cities yet imagine that they don’t. They all expect the city to conform to their fantasies and inconvenience everyone else.
Belsize Park is metres away from the Finchley Road, one of the most disgusting roads in north London. The local landmark, Ye Old Swiss Cottage, a pub, lives inside a roundabout.
It is not a weekend in the Cotswolds, where most villages would probably kill for a Co-op. If you want to eat artisanal food and dedicate your life to protecting cobblestones from lorries, I suggest you hurry to Castle Combe.
I have shopped in the “artisanal” butchers in Hampstead before and I was grateful to escape to Tesco, because I could actually afford to buy meat there. My advice to the Belsize Co-op is to disguise itself as a field. It could call itself Co-op Farmhouse.