I was in my local Londis (corner store chain) last week (it has a half-way decent range of organics, extremely rare in a corner store), when I noticed some peanut cookies, definitely not organic but in the cheap and hopelessly morish class.
But they were 99p each; I used to get three for a pound of exactly the same thing from the Leather Lane street market. So I left them on the shelf.
But I was reminded of this by a report in the Independent today.
Local street markets generate twice as many jobs as big supermarkets and sell goods at half the price of the supposedly cut-price retail giants, research shows.
Planning decisions that favour the building of huge outlets over established smaller markets could result in fewer jobs and less choice for local communities, a report by the think-tank the New Economics Foundation (NEF) warned.
Leather Lane thrives because it gets lots of office workers, but the markets in this part of Camden (Chalton and Plender Streets) are struggling, and further north the council has been trying to move them out altogether to use the sites for, you guessed it, luxury flats. What is needed is some lateral thinking to mix the traditional cheapie traders with more of the organic, “farmers’ market” type, I’d suggest. Oh, and make sure you genuinely block off the traffic – not done in either Chalton or Plender streets.
Moving to the other end of the market, found intriguing a story in the Telegraph about bespoke tailored bras.
‘Women who come to me think there is something wrong with them. “I have to talk to you,” they say. “I’m not normal,” and they are 36B. 36B is normal – it is the bra that isn’t normal! ‘Bras are the most difficult item of clothing to make,’ she continues. ‘More than shoes, more than hats. But the manufacturers don’t respect the bra. They make something only to cover the nipple. Our business is to support the bust. It’s not just to cover it.’ According to Poupie, the worst offenders are ‘seamless bras in elastic or stretchy fabrics – the women who wear these bras today are my customers of tomorrow! Stretchy straps are bad, too.’
Food for thought there…
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