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Soho’s last-place stand? Inside the battle to keep Berwick Street market independent

Critics fear Westminster councils initiatives to privatise this historic London market dangers is not simply the livelihoods of stallholders but Sohos distinctive identity

The first time Omar Aljabareen opened his Jerusalem Falafel stall on Berwick Street market in Soho, he sold one fold all day. I was alone in my gazebo; I used to go out in the street to present beings a appreciation, he withdraws. It was really hard to build up a business I suffered a lot.

Five years on, the stop utilizes six beings behind the bar, one of whom is stretching dough over a cushion while five more pass the wrappers along contributing salad, vegetables, tahini sauce. Aljabareen, a 34 -year-old Palestinian who studied biotechnology as a postgraduate before moving to the UK, sells around 250 wraps a era, chiefly to a queue of office workers plus a handful of both residents and sightseers exploring the backstreets of Londons West End.

But while Jerusalem Falafel is thriving, Berwick Street market once a traditional street market selling meat and household goods; now a hybrid composed of the representatives of remnants of this plus a handful of hot nutrient stops being threatened. Certainly, the working day I met Aljabareen could have been his judgement day trading here it was the expiry date on the temporary licence under which most of the stallholders operate, and for which they compensate 350 a month.

Westminster city council wants to privatise the market by bringing in a commercial hustler as the stallholders landlord, following a tendering process that opened last week. The merchants have responded by propelling awareness-raising campaigns to keep Berwick Street Market independent; they fear that as leases go up, world markets which dates back to the 18 th century, and in its 1920 s heyday was residence to 150 stallings will be altered, and the street will lose its distinctive identity as longstanding independent jobs are replaced by coffee bar and retail chains.

Berwick Street market is now a hybrid of traditional merchants and hot meat stalls. Picture: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

West End councillor and former Soho resident Glenys Roberts is a Westminster Conservative, but is on the campaigners side. She speculates the councils duration is wrong, and that there is more at stake on Berwick Street than the future of the 20 -or-so market speculators currently based here.

The land is certainly worth a rich and people want to maximise it, so its a fight between that logic and the ones who remember the old-time Soho, Roberts replies. Berwick Street is a sort of analogy for the duel of the someone of Soho: will its rather nice, scruffy creativity be able to survive, or will it all get so sanitised that it wont be worth extending?

Last month the traders were granted an extension, with their temporary licences renewed until next year. But to Aljabareen, the delay simply feels like a stand of hanging. When they take the tone from me, what am I going to do? he requests. My life is based on this. If the brand-new market hustler wont give me a rental for at least five years old, I cant understand a future. All my endeavours will have been for nothing.

His neighbouring stallholder Sam Coe appears similarly peril. Now 34, Coe whose 81 -year-old granddad is here to help out has worked on Berwick Street since he was 16, begin in Thats Andy hardware store before moving into the market when that business closed.

Coe specifies up at 7am six days a week on the cobbled, pedestrianised segment of the road that runs south from Oxford Street towards Shaftesbury Avenue. But building wields that have pictured the row of stores behind the market boarded up for redevelopment have damaged his business. Yesterday was the most difficult era ever I dont fantasize I took 75, he announces. You might as well be on a battlefield when the drilling starts; its like a container driving past.

Thriving Berwick Street market in the mid-7 0s. Photo: Jimmy James/ ANL/ Rex/ Shutterstock

New browses, plains and a Premier Inn are due to open underneath Kemp House, the 1960 s assembly cube that was once dwelling to Soho raconteur Jeffrey Bernard, but Coe feels privatisation will lead to rents going up some intimate as much as 400% alluring high-street calls while driving traditional street merchants like him away.

If beings are going to come in and accuse 100 a era for a tar then its goodbye to my business, he responds. Im very angry, to be honest. Soho was always segregated from Oxford and Regent Streets it was where you ran if you wanted something different, a bit of quirkiness. But now theyre moulding it into the same as everywhere else.

Further up the road, Laecia Stannett is wrapping lifts in cellophane behind the flower stop her friend Mark acquired from their leader. Now 51, she has been coming to Berwick Street since the 1970 s and because her friend, along with some fruit marketers, is one of a handful of permanent licencees, its own position is more secure.

But they very have joined the Berwick Street sellers group whose petition against privatisation is propped up on the Soho Dairy stall, because they fear rising costs. After outgoings including their share of the rental of a storage molted, and the barrow itself, Mark Stannett says he is lucky to clear 200 a week: Its hard, its very hard, but its better than be standing at home doing nothing.

I love this grocery, I cherish Soho, and theyre going to make it like every other street in London, Laecia adds. Thats whats sad its our little village.

Soho Dairy stallholder Robin Smith hopes world markets will get listed as an resource of community significance. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Robin Smith of Soho Dairy chairs a newly founded Berwick Street Traders Society, and is leading fundraising efforts to get the market listed by Westminster council as an resource of community importance. He feels if the plans are not halted, were thoughts for a grotesque, departure-lounge retail scenario. Theatre director Bob Carlton, a resident, remarks the neighbourhood has always changed, but now its being changed by corporations that dont know what Soho is. When Crossrail is built, he horror the neighbourhood will be coming only a terminus , not a target as it is now.

But not everyone on Berwick Street shares this sense of impending fate. In Borovick Fabrics, one of the oldest patronizes in the area with its reels of pink vinyl and gold and silver-tongued lam in the doorway Brian Berg was of the view that while he understands sellers nerves, he is optimistic about the impending developments.

Berg, who has worked in Soho since 1972 and used to run world markets association, recollects wall street searches a bit old-fashioned and necessitates some referred patronizes other than coffee houses and says he is delighted to see that Paperchase will soon be the first big chain store to open here. Here again, hes been hoping for improvements to Berwick Street for the past 40 years.

The current issue of the Soho Clarion, quarterly newsletter of the long-established Soho Society, declares that traders who have contended on through the building designs deserve awards and must be treated fairly but adds that change could very much be change for the better and offers support for Westminsters plans.

A certain amount of big business is good, admits Nick Hawker, the 33 -year-old co-owner of Soho Bikes, pointing out Sandqvist, the smart Swedish bag shop over the road. But, he includes, that modeling is not something we can compete with as a single accumulate so a balance must be strike. Hawker is a holder of Shaftesbury, the FTSE 250 -listed West End property company which owns around 30 structures here and is one of the key stakeholders in the dispute.

The petition to keep Berwick Street market independent is available to Westminster city council, where Daniel Astaire is cabinet member for business and regeneration with responsibility for sells. Astaire speaks any suggestion that world markets in its present form is being set up to fail is cynic and unfair Im fantastically supportive of street trading.

Traders help customers to sign up to their campaign against the markets privatisation. Picture: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Berwick Streets decline is long-term, in line with other traditional street markets. Whereas 20 years ago there were two sequences of up to 50 stalls selling fish, flesh, fruit and vegetables, plus miscellaneous household goods and clothing, today there are as few as a dozen on a quiet day.

Campaigners have long called for new asset( five years ago, as a London Green party activist, I connected them ), and last year the Conservative parliament resurfaced the road and installed electricity extents. Yet despite these improvements, Astaire guesses world markets is flunking at the moment. I have been wrestling with ideas to try to give it life and blood and vitality.

His solution is to turn the market over to a commercial-grade operator. Astaire acknowledges that one wants different things from Berwick Street: while residents and local restaurants are generally supportive of the conventional bloom and fruit stalls, others might favor more red-hot meat and the higher perimeters that go with this. He conceives an experienced operator can deliver both, adding that the council is not looking for a profit; the market exclusively needs to soak its face.

A local partnership board is written into the tender report, with the initial transaction for a pilot project persistent a year. The quality, according to Astaire, is designed to encourage ideal and project he foreground Pizza Pilgrims, formerly a stalling and now a pair of West End pizzerias, as an example of what can be achieved.

Traders say the streets limitless house studies have injury their business

But some locals, along with the Save Soho expedition co-founded by Stephen Fry in 2014 when the closure of nearby nightclub Madame Jojos was announced, believes Sohos aesthetic heritage is menaced, and that short-term profit for property owners could come at too high a price. Councillor Roberts calls for the duel to save Berwicks idiosyncratic retail mingle, and fight off the branded tents of a multinational operator, Sohos last stand. She also quarrels Astaires description of the market as a failure.

I have a certain sympathy with the ad hoc grocery theyve got there at the minute; its not all modernized and thats the charm of it, Roberts mentions. Developers and owners seem to think a market is better defined as an outdoor Waitrose. Now theres nothing incorrect with Waitrose, but I dont require all my meat wrap in cling film.

The councillor warns that if the redevelopment programme plan ahead, given the challenges such as the lack of storage and parking, it would be feasible the market could be dead within three years. But aging tops her register of relates: if the present group of sellers are given one year after the completion of the building works to make a go of the market, Roberts answers she would then be open to privatisation if they fail to raising it off.

Astaire proposes one mixture might be for the merchants to put in their own proposal through the tender process, and says theyve got as much probability as anyone else, but others question whether they have the necessary expertise.

The reinvention of markets

Across Europe, the average age of a market buyer is 65, and the generational concern is relevant when considering opening hours. While traditional street markets have always opened from early morning until mid-afternoon, many beings dont decide until finishing work in the night what they are going to eat.

Some hustlers, whether corporations or assemblies, are now experimenting with nighttime markets, or specialising in nutrient, antiques and way on different periods. The conventional street market present does strive, but the reinvention of marketplaces has got to be done in a curated path, announces markets campaigner Ellie Gill. We need to be more competitive, start adapting and not be afraid[ of change ].

Simon Quayle, a director at Shaftesbury, articulates a different market on weekdays and at weekends could be one mixture. Berwick Street is one of five key neighbourhoods for Shaftesbury, along with Covent Garden and the Carnaby Street area, but it is far from the only landlord here.

Shopping habits have changed dramatically since Berwick Street markets peak in the 1970 s. Image: Joseph McKeown/ Getty Images

The redevelopment of 90 -1 04 Berwick Street is by PMB Holding, while Soho Estates the company built up by strip team proprietor Paul Raymond is behind the contentious Walkers Court programme, with new golf-clubs and bureaux being built alongside a revamped Madame Jojos in the alley that connects Berwick Street with Shaftesbury Avenue.

Critics describe the cumulative impact of such programmes as devastating blandification, but Quayle supposes any show wall street will become an Oxford Street increase is false-hearted. Critics of the changes around Carnaby Street, he says, look at circumstances with rose-tinted glass, and forget it was full of tourist tat.

Shaftesbury renters on Berwick Street include independent music browses Reckless Record and Sister Ray, and Quayle says his corporation quality its musical patrimony Berwick Street is on the consider of Oasiss 1995 album( Whats The Story) Morning Glory? drawn attention to its support for the annual Record Store Day. But hires, he agrees, will go up.

Anna Boyle of So High Soho is another speculator who is holding on, despite her thwartings. When the fancy dress shop she co-owns was shut as part of the Kemp House change, she moved into two smaller shops over the road. Sitting on a stool in her changing rooms, she tells growth is inevitable, and Record Store Day is a good and rousing initiative. But she speculates the council is alarmingly out of touch with the retailers over whose fates it has so much control.

I is well aware difficult liaising with communities and change effects upset, but in this business solving problems is what we do every day, Boyle articulates. Im not opposed to everything; its simply that it has to be done in the right way. If the council hadnt made so many obvious blunders then Id feel empathy, but you end up appearing its deliberate when youre rendered three days to transport feedback in such consultations exercise.

Her business, she reads, has never been tougher, and where a serious endeavor at experiment might commit 100 inquiries, Boyle proposes Westminster exclusively wants to tick only three containers: Is it easy-going? Is it modern? Is it different?

Echoing a report being developed for London mayor Boris Johnson in 2010, which pointed to the social as well as economic benefits of markets, Boyle enunciates the value of the market is in the atmosphere it accompanieds. Its like a pause in the common cavity where it was touch base and connect. Sometimes I think the council is scared of that.

Since metropolis are not museums, there is always a balance between age-old and brand-new but Boyles panic, shared with others, is that the neighbourhood could become a retail theme park.

Right now, she would like to see an master to continue efforts to capture something of its history, or a Berwick Street Market gala. Its very difficult to know what price nostalgia has, she says. Id say its the closest youll get at time-travelling.

Westminster County Council is supporting a community consultation gratify at 6pm on Tuesday 26 July, at the Chinese Community Centre, 2 Leicester Court, London WC2