Mary Queen Of The High Street
Rooftopcowboy
Posts: 7,234 Forum Member
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Surprised not to see a thread on this given the amount of publicity the 'Portas Pilots' have had in the media...
This week Mary was in Roman Road in East London and yet again Mary pulled out her one-party trick that she does with every shop/town/business...move it upmarket!
so the East Londoners now have a poncey place to buy tat from boutiques & vintage stores they don't need, food & coffee from bistro's at treble the price of a greasy spoon etc
can imagine what she will do with Margate next week before I've even seen the show:rolleyes:
This week Mary was in Roman Road in East London and yet again Mary pulled out her one-party trick that she does with every shop/town/business...move it upmarket!
so the East Londoners now have a poncey place to buy tat from boutiques & vintage stores they don't need, food & coffee from bistro's at treble the price of a greasy spoon etc
can imagine what she will do with Margate next week before I've even seen the show:rolleyes:
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The Eastenders weren‘t buying there anyway, one trader took only £8 in a day. :eek: It looked much more vibrant after the council gave permission for food to be sold and if anyone, including the affluent incomers, want to go there and give old and new traders their money can't see there was much to complain about. Even the café owner who complained saw an upturn in his business once the market was reinvigorated.
A lot of the East End is now trendy and upmarket. I should know, I've lived in it for the last decade. Most of what was the old East End is now "gentrified" and very trendy with affluent, media, designer, artist, etc types moving in. There are still pockets of the "real" East End but not like it used to be.
Shoreditch, Dalston, Haggerston, Hackney, Hackney Wick, Bow.. all are either "up and coming" or are now really trendy, relatively expensive places to live. At the moment Clapton, and slowly behind it, Walthamstow, are going through the same thing. People will use the "poncey" as you put it places, and things will become more boutiquey and less scruffy and working class. That's just the way it is.
However, the whole area is having a mass regeneration and growth period due to the overground line so there's more people around with the cash to shop in the stores ! So it's a mixed bag I suppose
I felt a bit sorry for the junkshop lady. There she was getting by on selling bits and bobs for a few quid and suddenly she's being asked to shell out £900 on a chair. I have to agree that the shop needed a proper clean up and it did look fantastic for the relaunch.
I think her problem was that she didn't appeal to the snobs' vulgarity. Charging £200 for that cupboard, if she'd have charged £2000 they'd have been lapping it up. To appeal to that crowd you have to give the illusion that even breathing the air in your establishment is gonna be pricey.
I'm probably the only one who preferred it the way it was
I think I have the ideal re-brand name too!
LOL, yes quite. It's the whole Jimmy Choo thing. Those idiots would buy bags of soiled nappies if they were extortionately priced.
Mary's vision didn't work. I can see the logic of 'go where the money is' and all that but ultimately, those London types are a fickle bunch. Today's très chic stuffed animals will probably be passé this time next week and playing the catch up game is probably gonna be impossible for a small business like Jeanette's.
All in all, the programme confirmed my suspicions that Portas hasn't got a clue.
I know personally, when I go to buy my next fridge, it will be online with a store that has free delivery and installation and will even take the old one away for no charge.
The other problem you have is the betting shops that have opened up. The moment they move in, high streets start to go down hill quickly. You start getting anti social behaviour. So you can tart a high street up all you like, but the moment a betting shop or two open up, it just defeats the purpose.
get these ranting 'experts' off the screen.
What channel is this on and when?
CH4 9pm
Is that tomorrow I hope so as am watching the Fall at the moment
Yeah tomorrow
Letters were written to the local rag about it, Mary Queen of feckups.
If the local environment is mostly made up of people struggling to get by and with little disposable income then there isn't much chance for her brand of improvement.
I understand that Croydon is another recipient of "Portas" funding but unless Westfield do (as has been promised) come and build another large shopping complex which might well result in it becoming a "destination" town then I think it will fail miserably.
Any attempt to provide high end shopping has failed here. We even had a Heals for a while but it was always empty and didn't last long.
Those few people around here that do have money just go to London, Bromley, etc to spend it. A few food stalls won't be enough to save our market because there just aren't enough "yuppie" types here.
The main reason the market failed, in my opinion, is that the produce was mostly poor quality. It looked OK but went off almost immediately or, in some cases, the stuff on display looked fine but they gave you stuff from the back of the stall which was on its last legs. I haven't shopped in the market for years because it was a false economy and now there are only a handful of stalls there.
As another poster wrote just like Alex these experts have one huge advantage they are very wealthy so that already gives them a distorted view of things.
Councils have been giving planning permission for out of town developments for the last 20 years now and its gone very much like the USA where retail parks are centralised.
maybe she needs to work more on that side of things getting councils to look at creative ways of rates making the highstreet a much better investment for stores to remain there.
Any real talent worth listening too would be a billionaire.
Yes, people like her don't live in the real world. Of course her vision is all very well if people have plenty of disposable cash, but many people don't. She wants to appeal to the trendy set. It was the same with the charity shop programme she did a few years ago. Once she'd finished, she wanted things sold in the charity shops for four or five times the price, sometimes even more than that. I think one shop had an item or two for £100. No charity shop where I live has things for sale for that much!
Councils make renting the shops and market pitches too costly so no wonder there are lots of empty or struggling shops. We had a few really good little independant shops here up to about five years ago, but they've all gone. These people can't afford to run them anymore. It's all places like M&S, pound shops, phone shops, Tesco express etc that seem to be there. Nothing unique!
- allow, even encourage, out of town shopping developments with free parking
- ramp up in-town parking charges
- introduce anti car measures (as for some reason saving the planet is an important role for our local councils - though you can drive to the out of town malls as much as you like)
- stiff premises with massive business rates
- charge businesses for every little thing they can even though they're paying business rates.
The re-vamp of London's East End has driven up house prices and made the cost of living higher.