There must be more to towns than chain coffee

The shopping parade nearest my Tube stop, Finchley Road, used to have a very good nail bar and a coffee place, plus, inside the station, a handy WHSmiths. Two or so years ago, the nail bar was got rid of to make way for a Pret a Manger. Never mind that there was already the coffee place, an enormous Waitrose with a to-go food section right opposite, and, two minutes up the road, a Costa, a Nero and a Starbucks.

Well, during the pandemic, the Smiths was gutted and is now being turned into… a chain coffee place. The post-pandemic world is one in which local life enables us to buy three cups of coffee in as many metres, but no magazine to go with them.

The biggest force for homogenisation is the seemingly bottomless zest to build flats. The City of London has announced plans to convert vast premises left empty by Covid’s effect on offices into 1,500 flats by 2030. Outside London, the rise of online shopping has seen high streets in peril for years, with town officials increasingly converting former retail space into living space. Bicester, once a thriving town, lost six major shops during the last year, and is, like many, being reduced to little more than a sterile building site for new homes.

The market is the market, but it’s still a tragedy that all the character as well as utility seems to be seeping out of our cities and towns. The O2 Centre in Finchley Road, near me, isn’t nice, but it has a gym, Vue cinema, Habitat, Waterstones, Sainsbury’s and, at the end of the car park, a Homebase. Developers are planning to replace it all with a vast acreage of, you guessed it, flats, many of them luxury.

Of course it’s good if homes in London can become more affordable. But if the only thing residents can do is buy chain coffees, what’s the point of living here – or in any town – at all?