Brewers, bakers, mechanics and metalworkers share the capital’s most characterful industrial estate, and the rent is the story

Under the Arches: The Small Firms Powering London From Beneath the Railway

Every few minutes the ceiling rumbles. Nobody looks up. In the arch where I am standing, a baker is shaping loaves at a steel table, and the train passing overhead makes the flour on the bench shiver very slightly. Next door a man is repairing a motorcycle. Two arches along, a brewery is mashing in. This is one of London’s great business districts, and almost nobody who travels over it has any idea it is there.

The Victorians built their railways into the city on brick viaducts, and in doing so they created thousands of vaulted spaces beneath the tracks. For well over a century those arches have been where London puts the businesses it needs but would rather not look at: the garages, the joinery workshops, the scrap dealers, the cab repairers. I spent three weeks walking the lines in Hackney, Bermondsey, Walthamstow and Bethnal Green to see how they are faring.

Why the Arch Works

An arch is a nearly perfect small industrial unit. It has a wide front for deliveries, a high ceiling, thick walls that muffle noise, and neighbours who are in no position to complain about yours. It sits in the middle of the city, minutes from customers, in places where no planner today would permit a new workshop. It is damp, admittedly, and it is cold in winter. Tenants talk about their arch the way people talk about a difficult but beloved relative.

For a new business the appeal was always price. A mechanic or a furniture maker could afford an arch when a proper unit on an estate was out of reach. That cheapness is what turned the viaducts into an accidental incubator. A great many well-known London food and drink names began beneath a railway line because it was the only space the founders could pay for.

The Brewers Arrived

The modern chapter began with beer. When small breweries multiplied across the capital, they needed floor drains, headroom for tanks and tolerant neighbours. Arches offered all three. In Bermondsey a cluster of them along the viaduct became a Saturday destination, and what had been a row of lock-ups turned into one of the best known drinking routes in the country.

Others followed. Coffee roasters, gin distillers, cheese maturers, bakers, climbing walls, gyms, even theatres. An arch tenancy stopped being a sign that you could not afford better and became something to put on the label.

Then the Rent Arrived

Success has a cost, and it is usually paid by the people who were there first. As arches became fashionable, rents rose. The sale of a very large portfolio of arches to private investors some years ago sharpened the anxiety, and tenants organised to press for fair treatment. A tenants’ charter followed, and the landlords I contacted point to investment in repairs and to new lettings. Many tenants acknowledge the improvements. Many also showed me rent review letters with the expression of people reading a ransom note.

The worry is displacement. A taproom that sells pints at the weekend can carry a higher rent than a man who fixes exhausts. If every arch goes to the highest bidder, the mechanics and metalworkers move out to the edge of the city or stop trading, and London loses services it still needs. Somebody has to mend the vans.

What the City Loses Without Workshops

London has been shedding industrial land for decades, much of it to housing, which the city also badly needs. The result is that space for making and repairing things is now scarce, and the arches are a large share of what remains in the inner boroughs. City planners have become more protective of industrial capacity in recent years, which is welcome, though policy tends to arrive after the estate agent.

The economic case is not sentimental. Official business statistics from the Office for National Statistics show that the overwhelming majority of London firms are small. They are the caterers who feed offices, the printers, the stage builders, the people who service the lifts. A city that cannot house them close to their customers pays for it in traffic, in cost and in delay.

How Tenants Are Adapting

The canny ones have diversified. The baker I visited sells wholesale to cafes at dawn, opens a hatch to the public at eight and rents her arch to a supper club two evenings a week. A furniture maker in Hackney shares his with two other craftspeople and a single, much argued over, table saw. A brewery in Walthamstow told me the taproom, which began as an afterthought, now brings in more than the wholesale side. In an arch, as in most of London, you make the space work every hour it can.

Several mentioned the practical burdens that customers never see: negotiating a lease renewal, understanding business rates relief, complying with licensing. The guidance on GOV.UK is where most of them start, usually late at night and not in the best of moods.

Worth a Look Out of the Window

Next time your train slows on the approach to a London terminus, look down. Those brick curves are holding up more than the track. They hold a considerable slice of the working city, and the people inside are getting on with it under a ceiling that shakes every four minutes.

It would be easy to write this as a joke about hipsters and sourdough, and the British satirical news team down the corridor has done so with some style. I would only point readers to the house essay on what satirical commentary is, and what it is not, which makes the fair point that a good joke starts with getting the facts right. For jokes, there is also the British Onion page and the dependable NewsThump. For the facts, there is the bakery, which opens at eight. My other reporting on London business is collected on my author page at The London Prat.

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/