Comment: North London retail rents - a lesson in greed

A small London ‘village’ where rents are rising serves as a microcosm for what is happening everywhere.

Living in a street filled with independent retailers provides a salutary lesson in what is wrong with the retail world at large currently. The street is in a part of north London which sees heavy footfall at the weekend and modest numbers of potential shoppers during the week. It used to have everything that you’d expect of a ‘village’ London high street with a hardware store, a kitchen implements shop and a health food emporium being among its various highlights. Now increasingly it’s about cupcakes and cafes and, well, empty units.

The point about what is happening is less about an emerging retail monoculture and rather more to do with the upwards-only rent mentality of the various landlords who own the units along the strip. It would appear that a whole raft of leases have fallen due for renewal of late and as this has happened, a number of those who have traded here for years have thrown in the towel. The rent rises being demanded by the landlords are both about being detached from the economics of running a shop and, equally, about sheer unfettered greed. It would be churlish to name names, but for those with any familiarity with genteel north London, think Chalk Farm tube and then walk away from Camden – go figure.

What it does illustrate however is that on a micro or macro scale, the problems and difficulties that beset so many retailers are about more than shoppers heading online for their shopping. Instead, increasing rents would appear to be the hefty straw that is breaking the back of many retail camels, whatever their size or position within the retail spectrum.

The outcome in this instance is a once thriving retail neighbourhood that now has a kitchen shop, a new branch of Space NK and a bookshop – after which it’s pretty much upscale food and beverage units all the way down.

Nothing wrong with this, some might say, but the diversity that so many seem to point to as evidence of robust retail good health has more or less disappeared. Cafes, it would appear, are the only format that remains immune to the predations of the avaricious landlord.

More broadly, this serves as a microcosm for what is happening across the land – we continue to see landlords who think that in spite of a lacklustre economy, it is perfectly acceptable to keep tightening the thumbscrew and to send retailers to the wall. Shoppers surely deserve better.