Croydon has been waiting years for the arrival of John Lewis. The fact it’s going out of town is a hammer blow to the town centre.

Its common knowledge that John Lewis has had its ambitious expansion plans put on ice by the delays to many town centre developments, and that the creation of its new out-of-town John Lewis at Home format in Poole was a reaction to that.

Today’s announcement that the second of the stores is to be opened on Croydon’s Purley Way is a sign that the unglamorous south London suburb remains a destination for shoppers. It will get a warm welcome from the affluent customer base which surrounds Croydon to the south.

Unfortunately though it’s another nail in the coffin of a town centre which desperately needs some good news. John Lewis has been trying to get into Croydon for a long time, through anchoring the Park Place development on the giant Allders site in the town centre.

Through no fault of John Lewis’s, that scheme has become bogged down in interminable planning and funding difficulties, so who can blame the department store chain for calling it quits and going to an ex-Tesco site out of town which by comparison will be a piece of cake to get open and running.

What happens now to the regeneration of the town centre? The answer is probably nothing, and in fact the arrival of John Lewis on the Purley Way will hasten its decline because it will give affluent shoppers from the Surrey borders another reason not to visit the town centre, which has already become renowned for anti-social behaviour and will be left to become even less savoury than it already is.

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