A Hole In The High Street That Boris Can't Fix.

It was not until I did my Christmas shopping yesterday that I realised what a big hole Woolies will leave in the High Street. It is a serious inconvenience. There was a massive branch on Rye Lane here in Peckham. The Chernobyl branch of the People's Revolutionary and Victorious Grocery probably looks better stocked and maintained this month.

What will fill its space both literally and figuratively? Surely Peckham cannot handle another afro hairdresser, butcher, international money transferer, luggage vendor, mobile phone unlocking specialist or pound shop even if they do finally amalgamate all of these industries under one roof (and a lot of the shops on Rye Lane already come close). Of all the big chains in the Woolies bracket, Rye Lane probably has them all already. There's a Greggs, an Argos, a Morrison's, a Clark's Factory Shop, a McDonald's, a massive KFC and Peckham already possess branches of the Three for a Tenners; Netto, Lidl and Aldi.

Given those firms represent the high end of the Rye Lane retail experience, it is unlikely that Marks & Spencer are going to replicate their woeful Camberwell branch here and I think it is safe to say little interest has been taken in the site by Selfridge's, Harvey Nicholls or Harrods.

There is also the problem of where to go now for cheap stuff. By stuff, I mean absolutely everything under the Sun. Where do you go now if you want to buy plastic boxes that neither provide a home to smuggled cockroach carcasses nor cost the same as what your intuition tells you you should be paying for something ovenproof? Where do you now go for Christmas crackers that will not have to suffice as somebody's main present due to budget constraints and yet will not contain scraps of radioactive barbed wire? In fact, everything, barring fresh food, you could probably get at Woolies for cheaper than any other major chain and yet of better quality than at a pound shop. Yet, over the last ten years whilst credit card firms were willing to give a £50,000 Gold Card to your pet cat as long as there was a signature on the form reading Herbert T. Cat, too many people swapped looking for value for the dunderheaded tactic of waving a bit of plastic around in an attempt to keep up with the Beckhams. Buffoons across the country could dribble away the thought of debts the size of Jupiter in front of a 98 inch plasma tanning machine that required the wall it hung from to be reinforced.

Woolies had a niche which makes it even stranger that it has gone out of business. Is that not what they always say in business books - find a niche? Is that not the key to untold riches? Poundland is still too pikey and randomly stocked to step up to the plate and yet all the other big firms think themselves in the aspirational bracket and charge accordingly.

What I will miss the most about Woolies though is that it was the home of the bargain. Some of my greatest CD purchases were form Woolies. The music was cheap enough to take a punt on and so one winter's Saturday in Chatham High Street, I gambled on a Velvet Underground album, a Philly Soul compilation and a Motown compilation. I still play the last two over ten years later and the Velvet Underground album eventually found a loving owner better suited to tend its needs. In the words of Meat Loaf, two out of three ain't bad. It is only thanks to Woolies aggressive discounting that I could have taken a gamble where a 67% success ratio would be satisfactory in the days when all I had to rely on was the pittance paid for, in the words of that other ancient rock act, Dire Straits, moving refrigerators and colour TVs around the Rochester branch of Comet.

In an era when it is possible that a lot more of us could end up in jobs we thought we had waved goodbye to after school and on similar wages, who is going to step in and fill the almighty black hole left by Woolies?

Mugs who spent money in Lapland New Forest deserve no sympathy. For a start, the naming formula for the place is the same as that given by yuppie flat developers to unfashionable parts of London to make their concrete dorm boxes seem somehow an essential part of London's funky fabric despite the fact that, by dint of being thrown up at the end of City airport's runway they have a shorter commuting time to Frankfurt than the West End and all the local bus routes start with a letter, they are about as far removed from beating-heart-of-the-metropolis cool as Alperton is from Mont Blanc. You know there's a weak product behind a place where the syntax is the only thing they can mangle to make the place sound attractive.

Also, let us not forget that these families will now have anecdotes that will last them Christmases to come. As Shakespeare would have written had he set Henry V on an estate of two or three bedroom starter homes with easy access to out-of-town supermarkets and tansport links,

This day is call'd Saturday, 29th of November.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Lapland New Forest.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is 29th November.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had when Dad headbutted an elf and security kicked off.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall the attractions,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Lapland Snow Scene, the emaciated huskies,
Sheds and tents, snow spray and Fake Santa-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And a Christmas shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that shells out thirty sheets with me plus an extra tenner to get a photo with Santa
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now at Alton Towers
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their crackers cheap whiles any speaks
That fought the elves in trainers with us upon 29th November.

Nobody wants to hear about perfect Christmases. However, who would not want to hear about the year we saw a plastic polar bear in the attack position, paid £5 to go into a tent masquerading as a Christmas market but only sold £1 rolls of wrapping paper, saw elves smoking and texting their mates and saw Mummy run over an elf with a pram when the elf tried to charge her extra for a photo after a four hour queue to get into Santa's shed? Lapland New Forest wasn't a rip-off, it was a thirty pound investment in years worth of comedy gold to be recounted at every Christmas from now until eternity. Frankly, you can keep your "Gavin and Stacey" DVD gift packs.

As such, I will be running my own Easter Fair here in London. In the interests of transport access, I will be using the railway arches underneath Peckham Rye station. Although they may look like dodgy cut-and-shut mechanic workshops, they are in fact, the enchanted warren of the Easter Bunny. Your mewling horde will marvel as they see real live rabbits dressed in ballerina costumes suspended from the ceiling, I mean, flying as if by magic, throughout the warren. There will be a traditional Easter Market selling traditional spoiled goods from the Netto on Rye Lane (entry costs extra), "classic" Easter music (Oasis, Kaiser Chiefs, Ne-Yo) will sound throughout the mystical warren and finally, guided by local children (all armed to the teeth, with criminal records longer than an Emerson, Lake and Palmer live recording and wearing traditional South London Easter costumes - Nike tracksuits) visitors will be able to meet the Easter Bunny himself. Visitors should not be discouraged by the smell of marijuana or doner kebab on the Easter Bunny's costume, nor should his notoriously short temper deter children from queueing overnight for the chance to spend an extra £20 on a low resolution photo with our magical furry friend and a dented creme egg. Come one, come all.

A lot of articles about London dig up quotations about the city from great literary figures of old. It is almost as hackneyed a method of starting a piece as the infamous dictionary definition which was a great trick in primary school as it made you look scholarly and provided a good excuse to leave the class room and roam the corridors "looking for a dictionary." You would think though, that by the time you got to the stage where you were judged to be so good a writer that people paid you to do it, you would be slightly more resourceful. After all, you wouldn't go to the doctor's and expect them still to prescribe Calpol for every ailment from the sniffles to bowel cancer.

Some of the best descriptions of London though are overheard from everyday Londoners. Two that have stuck in my mind were of that ilk. What is best about them is that they say a lot about the mentality of the people that trotted them out. Thus they give you a sense of place with a bonus of resident. After all, what would London, or any city, be without its population.

A recent favourite, my friend heard someone describe their house as a "1930's semi with a tudor feel." The 1930s semi describes vast swathes of London. It is probably far more representative of a London that Londoners occupy than the gherkin, Belgravia mansions or the Barbican. What was great about the quote though was the shameless reinterpretation of that other most English of design concepts, the mock tudor. What is a "tudor feel" after all? Do the vast kitchens have their own postal disctrict? Is there a maze on the front lawn? Does a guild meet at the serving hatch? No, of course not. The homeowner is trying to tread a fine line. On the one side is her "shame" of admitting to living in a mock tudor house which she feels would classify her as a plumber in a tracksuit. On the other, she is briefing everyone what to expect if they come round so they can't leave the house gossiping viciously about how she didn't mention the black beams and whitewash on the front wall and that she's no better than a plumber in a tracksuit. Simultaneously, she is also trying to engage in that activity that the stunningly mediocre do to get anywhere in the status race: talking up her game. What an informed purchase this particular item was. Why, there must be only a few hundred thousand examples left between Chislehurst and Eltham. What canny ablity to find such a gem. If she had a rusty Ford Escort van in the driveway, would she describe this as an "proto-sports utility vehicle with a seasoned aesthetic"?

A similar favourite of mine was a woman advertising a room in her flat on the company's internal bulletin board where I worked at the time. She described the place as being in "Limehouse Village." It is one thing when estate agents stick quarter or village or quays on to the end of a name like Gasworks, Hangman's or Dungheap but when the residents start doing it too, it is a bad business. What scenes can the Limehouse villager expect to see in this delightful rural idyll? Is that an ancient coaching inn I see before me that has been open since all of England had its first Tudor feel? Is that the local parson cycling merrily past the green waving at the local cricket XI as the birds chirp in the trees only disturbed by the occasional thwack of willow upon leather and the subsequent gentle ripple of applause? Could that be the village postman chatting happily away to the loveable old lady who lives alone in the seven hundred year-old New Cottage who knew his father when he was the village postie and his father's father before that? No, its a Victorian slum with a dock in the middle dotted with the identikit sterile yuppy flats.