The last branch of the last bank has recently vanished but never mind. There are numerous places on this high street which say ‘Money Transfer’ on their signs. Along the main half-mile stretch, I jot down 11 of them.
If this is peculiar, what I find even stranger is that I do not – in the course of several hours – see a single person actually using any of them. I drop into one of them and ask how I might buy a few euros but the man at the desk looks blankly and says: ‘No understand’.
At Juba Express Money Transfer, I go through the door and there is nobody on the premises. I shout ‘hello’ but no luck. Nor when I drop by a few hours later. The lights are on and the sign on the front says: ‘Service Beyond The Ordinary’. In one sense, I suppose, that is true.
According to the latest accounts at Companies House, this business is solvent and employs ten people. One can but wonder what they do all day.
If there are ample opportunities to send money, sending a letter is rather trickier. I find one convenience store which doubles up as the Post Office, though there is a sign on the door saying, ‘Closed for lunch’.
It’s a rather quaint reminder of an age when many businesses did indeed shut in the middle of the day. Andy Burnham is not the only one hankering for the slow pace of life back in the blissful 1970s.
When it comes to finding lunch, however, the options are almost endless here on the Uxbridge Road, the beating heart of Shepherd’s Bush in west London.
This may be the only road in the entire UK without a Greggs but I count no fewer than 32 fast food outlets on the same stretch of road (33 if you include Nando’s). Many – if not most – offer fried chicken.
Uxbridge Road in Shepherd's Bush, west London, has no fewer than 33 takeaways and 11 barbers
And if you need a haircut, then you really have come to the right place. I count 11 barbers along the same stretch and just two customers in all of them this afternoon (I return at 7pm to find a few more people having a trim but most chairs up and down the strip sit empty).
More interesting are certain cafes which, while busy, are occupied solely by men. ‘I’m afraid that we have a number of what I call “men-only” places which would be very intimidating if I went in – which I won’t,’ says Jenny (not her real name) pointing to a brightly-lit cafe serving Somali food.
While vocal media campaigns have ensured that women are now welcome in erstwhile bastions of ‘sexism’, from the Garrick Club to the home of cricket, the Marylebone Cricket Club (the MCC), the commentariat has yet to turn its attention to the fast food outlets of the Uxbridge Road.
We hear a lot about the decline of the High Street, about the disappearance of independent retailers, the problems with soaring business rates and the prevalence of the ‘wrong’ sort of shops – notably bookies, vape kiosks and takeaways. If there are two indicators of a troubled town centre, they are shuttered shop fronts and pop-up charity shops.
Successive governments have promised to revitalise these places. That has usually meant appointing a ‘tsar’, commissioning a report and mumbling something about having a look at business rates.
The latest offering is a £210million package from Andy Burnham to help councils rebuild derelict town centre hubs like old cinemas and pubs.
‘The truth is that too many high streets have been left to hollow out, leaving town centres a shell of what they once were,’ the Prime Minister said the other day.
‘People don’t measure growth by looking at a spreadsheet. They measure it by looking at their local high street. Are shops opening or are the shutters down? Does the place feel like it’s moving forward or being left behind?’
Robert Hardman heard from locals how the high street has steadily gone into decline, with independent stores being replaced by vape shops, bookies and takeaways
Brothers Jaspir and Sukhvinder Bhachu own the much-loved local institution Greenford Timber on Uxbridge Road - but they fear once they retire it will suffer the same fate as many of the street's shops
Here on the Uxbridge Road, people are not so much worried about closures. A few places are boarded up but many of those are being refurbished and, interestingly, there are no charity shops.
There is no shortage of people interested in opening yet another vape, money or fast food outlet. One would-be retailer here tells me that when he expressed an interest in subletting a small, empty shop, the existing tenant demanded a £90,000 added premium on top of a £40,000 annual rent.
How would that make business sense? ‘It wouldn’t – unless you were laundering more than dry cleaning,’ he laughs.
What increasingly concerns residents is simply the rundown tone of the place which, in turn, leads to a decline in other things.
What makes this an interesting case study, however, is that, instead of simply posting grumbles on social media, they have formed a pressure group which is actually starting to make some headway.
No one expects magic solutions or an instant makeover but, by being a constant pain in the municipal backside, they can now see some tangible results.
‘We just want to inject a bit of pride into this place,’ says Noor, a lawyer in her 30s who was so ‘shocked’ by the general sense of neglect when she moved into the area a few years ago that she set up a campaign called Fix Uxbridge Road.
She started with a petition calling on the local authority, the Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, ‘to take urgent, targeted action to improve the visual condition and vibrancy of Uxbridge Road’.
It included specific complaints about neglected shop fronts, exposed wiring, cluttered pavements and tatty signage and an enforcement of ‘design standards that enhance, not degrade, the street’.
A petition with more than 250 signatures is enough to trigger a council debate. This one rapidly clocked up 3,000 and the Labour-run council duly pledged to do some tidying up, sending out teams to get rid of graffiti and chewing gum while painting pretty patterns on a few steel shutters.
The campaigners wanted very much more than that and kept on going, resulting in a Labour manifesto pledge to ‘invest multi-million-pound funding into Uxbridge Road’ during this year’s local election campaign.
There is, of course, only so much that councils can do when it comes to controlling the use of premises. Some things need to be driven by the Government.
The story of Uxbridge Road is sadly typical of many British high streets
There is, for example, no law against a cluster of fast-food outlets or, indeed, against having tatty shops that don’t appear to do much and lower the tone.
Hammersmith and Fulham is working with other authorities to lobby the Government for stronger powers of enforcement and for more specific Land Registry in order to deal directly with landlords (rather than watch one dodgy pop-up ‘candy shop’ replace another while the registered store owner is uncontactable in Mumbai or Dubai).
‘We have been calling for – and would warmly welcome – any changes from the Government that give councils the power to stop clustering,’ says the council in a lengthy statement.
‘We agree with residents that there are too many betting shops, unhealthy takeaways, money lenders and vape shops.’
But the telltale signs of improvement are there.
Walking along the main half-mile stretch of the Uxbridge Road, running west of Shepherd’s Bush Green, campaigners Jenny, Angie and Kat show me some of their achievements.
One is the railway bridge which carries the Hammersmith & City line over the road. It used to be caked in graffiti and peeling paint. It is now in pristine shades of blue.
Dozens of shop awnings have been cleaned by the council, which has also pressured British Telecom into removing several redundant phone boxes.
The very first commercial premises we pass on the south side of the road, however, is no stranger to enforcement officers. Ten years ago, the Woody Grill halal kebab shop was fined £30,000 for filthy hygiene after multiple complaints of food poisoning. Three years ago, it was forcibly closed down for three months for repeatedly hiring illegal workers. Business seems to be booming.
On the other side of the road, I notice a row of five shops, one of which sells vapes and three of which offer mobile phone cases and repairs. ‘A lot of people have mobile phones – and I was here first!’ says the man in the middle one. There are no fewer than 11 of these along the strip.
The campaigners are also miffed that the street has four bookies, including one right next to a primary school, plus two more within a five-minute walk. One is an empty branch of BetFred. ‘We’re hoping it will become something else but if it gets bought by another betting firm, then there’s nothing anyone can do,’ says Noor.
There are some telltale signs of improvement. This pristine bridge used to be caked in graffiti and peeling paint
None of my guides is prepared to have her full name or photograph published. ‘We get enough abuse as it is,’ says Jenny, adding that one (male) member of the team has received death threats for his complaints against a certain cafe with a round-the-clock clientele of minicab drivers.
As well as parking on double yellow lines, they use the surrounding streets and front gardens to relieve themselves since the cafe has no toilet.
As Noor explains, you can change the atmosphere simply by adding some extra greenery and removing the uglier street furniture. However, having planted a few new, young trees along the street, the council has had to encase them in metal cages because of vandalism. Even then, one specimen is now missing a branch.
The council sends me a list of other recent activities which runs to several pages, including clampdowns on advertising boards, littering, illegal parking and counterfeit goods. The area is to be included in a new Local Plan which will give it greater powers to direct the future shape of the place. It has also ringfenced money from developments like the disused police station for street improvements.
Above all, perhaps, is the fact that the campaigners now have a meeting with a designated council cabinet member every fortnight. Last week’s went on for nearly three hours.
‘Things are happening but we have to keep on top of it,’ says Noor. ‘Last year, we flagged the lack of any Christmas lights and were told it would happen this year – but now we’re being told to come back in a year.
‘You raise a particular breach of planning rules but it turns out that the thing has been there longer than four years, so the council say they can’t do anything about it. It’s that sort of thing.’
The campaigners point out that no sooner had they persuaded one part of the council to remove some unsightly cycle lane steel posts, another part of the council came along to cement them into the road. However, just like the recent independence referendum in the tiny Oxfordshire village of Piddington (in protest against a new asylum centre), this small campaign shows how a well-organised action group can either prod or shame officialdom into some sort of response.
Talking to local residents, I find unanimous support for the campaign. Many point to the nearby Askew Road, previously a bit of a dump but now in proud possession of that great imprimatur of upward mobility: a Gail’s.
‘We’re not talking about gentrification. What we want is diversification,’ says Noor. ‘Why can’t we have, say, a deli or a bookshop instead of another fried chicken place?’
I suppose some Lefties will call this lot Nimbys. After all, our so-called ‘Minister for Nature’, Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, has just derided the idea of village greens, warm ale and labradors as a ‘far-Right nostalgic vision’ of Britain.
Yet this campaign group could hardly be more diverse. Its organisers variously identify as Middle Eastern, Indian, Sri Lankan and Polish, while also being proud-to-be-British west Londoners.
We meet for coffee at the Little Napoli, an Italian restaurant owned by an Egyptian married to a Hungarian. ‘We love this area,’ says owner Amr Nasr, ‘but please no more chicken shops!’
All are thrilled that an old Victorian pub, the Queen Adelaide, is being refurbished and will soon reopen as the Talli Queen which its owners, Avi Shashidhara and James McLean, describe as a ‘gastropub with Indian food.’
The campaigners are less pleased, however, that, having bid farewell to the local branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and swiftly seen a sharp decline in litter and double parking, the landlord has now leased it to a new tenant who has opened – a new KFC.
A few yards away stands a much-loved local institution. Greenford Timber is an old-fashioned hardware shop, piled floor to ceiling with everything for the building trade and a basement full of timber and pipes. But it has a ‘To Let’ sign in the window.
For more than 45 years, it has been owned by brothers Jasbir and Sukhvinder Bhachu but both are now past retirement age and trying to find someone to keep it going as an ironmongery.
‘Most of the offers so far are from people who want to turn it into a cafe or restaurant,’ sighs Jasbir, 73.
Chicken wings, anyone?