West End Letters: chapter and verse | David Bieda Founder Trustee, the Covent Garden Area Trust | Cecil Court

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West End Extra - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published: 08 May 2009

Specialist shops: Still available in Cecil Court ‘…because that’s the policy’

Chapter and verse on how to defend our bookshops

I WAS interested to read that Mark Field MP is – justifiably – concerned about the loss of bookshops in Charing Cross Road (New chapter in bookshop saga, May 1), but I doubt if writing to Barbara Follett MP as minister for culture, the creative industries and tourism will do the trick.
The loss of specialist retail and retail as a whole in the West End and throughout London and the UK has been the subject of many campaigns to no avail. What realistic avenues are there to stem these losses?
Cecil Court still has its specialist shops because that’s the policy of the Salisbury family.
Carnaby Street and Seven Dials have specialist fashion retail because that’s the policy of Shaftesbury PLC, so the first answer is sympathetic freeholders, and that’s very rare.
The Soho Housing Association has seen the loss of five bookshops under Sandringham Flats in Charing Cross and I raised this at their annual meeting when the first was rented as a coffee bar about five years ago to no avail, and they refused to advertise these units only for bookshop use when they became vacant.
The Piazza in Covent Garden still retains many specialist uses and that’s because after the Greater London Council bought it a small group of us from the Covent Garden Forum and officers from the GLC drew up the specialist leases which prohibited run-of-the-mill clothes shops and brands.
The Covent Garden Area Trust retains control of these leases and its agreement is needed for any changes. However that is a unique, though commercially successful, set-up.
The third avenue is for local authorities to advertise a limited number of their own shop units for specialist uses as did the GLC when it owned around 10 per cent of the Covent Garden area.
Thus we had a butcher, fishmonger and general convenience store all of which disappeared when the GLC’s lands were sold.
Westminster City Council could do this.
There is one other option which is to strengthen the planning regime so, as in Paris I believe, a change of use is far more specific so permission would be needed to change from say a bookshop.
This is highly unlikely in our current deregulatory country and unlikely to be promoted by any political party.
Indeed the latest review of the planning system (the Killian Pretty report) proposes that shopfronts and ventilation systems should no longer need planning permission.
The latter would, of course, be a disaster for inner-city mixed-use areas and the former would lead to yet more fully open shopfronts such as those in Oxford Street and Camden High Street thus adding to the carbon emissions we are being urged to reduce!
If I have omitted any other options maybe readers will respond with (realistic) ones?
David Bieda
Founder Trustee, the Covent Garden Area Trust

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