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?