Chelsea Bloom on what happens to a neighbourhood when its primary workforce stops commuting

By Chelsea Bloom

The Angel and Old Street corridor — the stretch of North and East London that acquired the nickname Silicon Roundabout in approximately 2010 and has been embarrassed about it ever since — has been through a significant employment contraction over the last two years as global technology companies reduced their London headcount and several domestic technology businesses went through restructuring of varying severity. The effects on the neighbourhood economy are not what you might expect, or rather they are exactly what you might expect and nobody in the neighbourhood seems to have expected them.

Specifically: the lunch economy has collapsed. This sounds like a trivial observation. It is not. The lunch economy of a commercial neighbourhood is a proxy measure for the density of employed people physically present in offices on weekday afternoons, and that density has declined in ways that are visible in the closure rates of food businesses along City Road, Upper Street, and the streets connecting them that spent the 2010s building out a hospitality offering calibrated to the tech worker demographic.

What Closed and When

I counted twelve food and hospitality businesses along the Angel-Old Street corridor that have closed since January 2023, a higher rate than the three preceding years combined and a higher rate than comparable high streets in adjacent areas that have a more diverse employment base. The businesses that closed skew toward the format that serves office workers: fast-casual lunch, coffee with workspace, and the category I think of as “the place that does really good sandwiches and was always full at noon on Wednesdays,” several of which are now empty units with letting agent boards.

What has not closed, or has closed at lower rates: the hospitality businesses that serve evening trade, the weekend brunch venues that serve residents rather than workers, and the businesses at price points below the tech-worker-income calibration that the area’s opening wave targeted.

The Adaptive Response

Several remaining businesses have adapted their trading model: extended evening hours, weekend programming, and in two cases a deliberate pivot toward the residential customer rather than the office customer. One cafe owner told me she had reduced her opening hours on Monday and Tuesday — historically her weakest days for office-worker trade — and introduced a supper club on Friday evenings that has been consistently booked since September. “I am not sure the office workers are coming back,” she said. “I have decided to stop waiting and start selling to the people who live here.” The ONS employment data tracks sector-level employment. The high street health check methodology documents the retail vacancy metrics. Chelsea Bloom covers North London business at prat.uk.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com