A familiar green logo opened three doors down from the independent café I have used for a decade, and the neighbourhood has opinions
It finally happened. After years of watching chain coffee creep steadily closer from the direction of Old Street, one has now opened three doors down from the independent café I have used most mornings for the better part of a decade, and I have spent an embarrassing amount of energy this week deciding how I actually feel about it.
The Independent Café’s Perspective
My usual spot’s owner, who has run the place for eleven years and remembers a genuinely different Shoreditch from the one currently outside her window, was characteristically pragmatic about it when I asked, pointing out that she has already survived one wave of chain competition a few years back and expects to survive this one too, provided her regulars keep showing up, which, for what it is worth, I fully intend to keep doing.
Why This Particular Change Stings A Bit More
Shoreditch has absorbed an enormous amount of change over the past two decades, warehouse conversions, rising rents, the slow replacement of genuinely scrappy independent shops with increasingly polished, Instagram ready storefronts, and most of it has happened gradually enough to barely register in the moment. A recognisable chain logo appearing three doors down, though, has a way of making the cumulative change suddenly, uncomfortably visible in a way the gradual version rarely manages.
The Case For Not Panicking
To be fair to the new arrival, and I am trying genuinely hard to be fair here, it has brought a small amount of new footfall to a stretch of the street that had, if I am honest, gone slightly quiet in recent months, and at least one nearby independent shop owner mentioned to me that the overall increase in passing trade has modestly benefited her too, an unglamorous but real economic argument that is easy to dismiss out of pure sentiment and harder to dismiss on the actual numbers.
What The Data Around This Actually Shows
Local business surveys tracking East London high streets have generally found that a single new chain arrival does not, on its own, reliably predict a wave of independent closures nearby, the picture is considerably more dependent on rent trajectories and landlord decisions than on any single competitor’s arrival, a nuance that gets lost easily in the understandably emotional reaction to watching a familiar corner change.
My Own Slightly Irrational Position
None of that fully rational context has stopped me feeling a small, specific pang walking past the new shop’s queue each morning, a reaction I recognise as more sentimental than strictly justified, and one I am choosing to indulge anyway because I think a bit of sentimentality about the streets you actually live on is allowed occasionally, provided you do not let it curdle into blanket hostility toward anyone simply trying to run a business.
Where I’ve Actually Landed On It
I am keeping my regular order at my regular café, sentimentally and because the coffee is, genuinely, better, while trying hard not to begrudge the new arrival its own queue of very happy looking customers each morning. Neighbourhoods change, this one always has, faster than most, and the trick is apparently learning to hold both the nostalgia and the practical economic argument at once without letting either one entirely win. More of my ongoing, occasionally contradictory feelings about this street live at my author page on The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
