Chelsea Bloom on what is actually happening on one of North London’s most overlooked commercial streets

By Chelsea Bloom

The Holloway Road has not been fashionable since the 1970s, and depending on your definition of fashionable, possibly not since the 1870s. It is a long, loud, traffic-heavy arterial road connecting Highbury Corner to Archway, lined with chicken shops, phone repair outlets, charity shops, and the kind of estate agent that lists properties using photographs taken on a device that appears to date from 2009. It is also, quietly and in ways that are easy to miss if you are not paying attention, acquiring a layer of independent businesses that are genuinely interesting, well-run, and contributing something to a street that has not had much contributed to it in a while.

I have been monitoring the Holloway Road for a piece I have been developing on North London high street regeneration for six months, which means I have drunk more coffee on that street than is medically advisable and have become on first-name terms with the owners of four independent businesses, the manager of the local Lidl, and a man called Dave who has been restoring classic motorcycles in a unit behind a chicken shop since 1992 and is not part of the regeneration story but is worth knowing about regardless.

What Has Opened

In the last eighteen months: a record shop specialising in jazz and soul that also runs a listening bar on Thursday evenings; a natural wine shop whose owner came from a hospitality background and who described her decision to open on Holloway Road as “either very smart or very naive, and I won’t know which for another two years”; a bakery that sells out by 11am on weekends; and a book shop, which is either the most optimistic business decision in North London or a sign that the street has crossed a threshold that book shop owners, who are empirically good at reading neighbourhood trajectories, have identified as viable.

The Precariousness

Every owner I spoke to mentioned the same variable: the lease. Commercial rents on Holloway Road are lower than comparable arterial roads in adjacent postcodes, which is why the independents can afford to be here. They are not low enough that the business model is comfortable; they are low enough that it is possible. The difference between these conditions and a rent increase that forces the business to close or relocate is the lease renewal negotiation, which will come for each of these businesses within the next three to five years, at which point their success — if they are successful, which their current trading suggests — will make the argument for a rent increase that removes the conditions that produced the success.

The Islington Local Plan includes commercial area protections that are relevant to this dynamic. The Federation of Small Businesses data on high street viability documents the pattern nationally. The Holloway Road story is real. Its duration is uncertain. Chelsea Bloom covers North London business at prat.uk.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com