My Corner of London Starts to Wake From Lockdown Coma

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- I was due to see The Killers next weekend. I’m a big fan of the Las Vegas band, and the gig was almost literally on my doorstep, at Arsenal Football Club’s Emirates Stadium. Sadly, the pandemic has delayed the concert until next year. But there are stirrings among my other local businesses that make me optimistic life is starting to return to normality, or at least something resembling it. 

I live just off Holloway Road, the main highway heading north out of London, whose status is embodied in its official classification as the A1. My local pubs — the Horatia, the Victoria Tavern and the Rose, all less than five minutes’ walk away — are shuttered, as are the nearby dry cleaners, the hairdressers and the nail salons. Local eateries, though, are slowly coming back to life.

Five years ago, three brothers took over a discount store at 60 Holloway Road called “Pound Baazar” (a misspelling that never failed to make me smile). Nick, Kaski and Kush Ukaj, originally from Kosovo, renamed it “The Barn,” refurbished it with a rustic wooden interior and built a thriving cafe serving gourmet coffee, home-baked cakes and pastries and an all-day breakfast and lunch menu.

Then in March, Kaski, the youngest of the trio at 32, got flu symptoms associated with the coronavirus and was forced to self-isolate in his bedroom. The business, which closed for six weeks, has only just reopened serving takeaway coffee and cakes. Weekly revenue, which in good times could reach 6,000 pounds ($7,400), will drop to a couple of hundred pounds at best, says Nick, the eldest brother at 38. 

Nick has been in the restaurant game for 20 years, including stints at the Gaucho and Browns dining chains. As a small business, he got 10,000 pounds of government assistance during lockdown. But even if he can open fully in the next few weeks, he’ll struggle if he has to rearrange the tables to observe two meters of social distancing, reducing the number of covers down from the 60 the cafe can currently offer. “Six months with twenty people, I can't survive,” he says.

So he’s planning to expand his hours and his potential income by staying open in the evenings and serving wine, tapas and cheese boards. However, this will mean less time with his family, which was a large part of his motivation for starting up on his own in the first place.

Just up the street, at 193 Holloway Road, the Chip Inn Fish Bar serves traditional fish and chips. The manager, Mahut, has been frying haddock and battering sausages for the past 12 years. His decision to reopen in recent days, after furloughing his staff for six weeks, has been the highlight of my lockdown. He also received 10,000 pounds of government assistance, and all of his staff are now back at work.

Two doors down from the fish-and-chip shop, on the other side of a closed nail salon, the Holloway Food Express opened for business a couple weeks ago with a shiny new facade and a sign proclaiming “Under New Management.” Even the pandemic wasn’t enough to derail Gurcam Killi’s plan to launch a new convenience store — a business he bought from his cousins that had been deteriorating for nearly a decade.

Convenience stores have been big winners during the lockdown. Independent grocers and corner shops in the U.K. saw sales soar by more than 60% in the three months to May 17, according to retail analysis firm Kantar. Gurcam says he missed out on the initial burst of panic buying that accompanied lockdown, but that sales are improving day by day. “You need to have the passion to do well,” he says.  

Over the road, Cookies and Scream has been selling gluten-free, vegan brownies, donuts and cookies from 130 Holloway Road for the past four years. The business started in 2010 in Camden Market; not long after the Holloway café opened, a fire destroyed the original premises.

After closing for just one week at the start of lockdown, the bakery reopened with a one-customer-at-a-time policy, to sell takeaway food and drink on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Manager Kane Pope says it’s hard to estimate how much the store’s revenue has declined. “It’s going all right,” he says. “There are lots of people around. But reopening fully feels a long way away.”

At the Chip Inn Fish Bar, Mahut also has a strict policy of only allowing a single customer in at once, with the rest forced to queue on the street outside. As a result, even with London basking in good weather that stretches into the evenings, he reckons turnover is down by about 40% since he reopened. But he’s determined to pull through. “We’ve been here since 1962,” he says, proudly pointing to a sign testifying to the longevity of the business. “We’ll survive.”

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mark Gilbert is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering asset management. He previously was the London bureau chief for Bloomberg News. He is also the author of "Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable."

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