The Kitchen Shoppe premises have reopened as the Clapham Discount Store after a complete refit, continuing to serve the same household goods needs that kept it trading for 20 years. The new owners have unfortunately fallen into the familiar trap of confusing Clapham with Battersea, despite the shop’s actual Lavender Hill location.
A month ago we reported on the end of the Kitchen Shoppe after 20 years of trading. They were the sort of unglamorous-but-useful family run general household goods store you’ll find as a matter of course on most south London high streets, that will never exactly set the world on fire but which makes a steady turnover on fairly thin margins.
- Read our article: With rent increasing and business struggling, a cluster of changes for some of Lavender Hill’s traders
We once had lots of similar shops, but the Kitchen Shoppe’s sheer staying power meant that the Kitchen Shoppe had ended up as the last-but-one of their kind in Clapham Junction. The range included DIY goods, cleaning products, small furnishings and accessories, buckets and storage boxes, art supplies, somewhat fluorescent plastic garlands, and of course pans, glassware, utensils and cookware.
The lease inevitably came to its end, and the premises went up for a new lease, at an asking rate just short of £90,000 a year. The Kitchen Shoppe had turned a modest profit over the years, but as an honest purveyor of low-priced household goods – and also, as some of our readers noted, very much as an ‘old school’ traditional retailer pre-dating the era when it was competing with online delivery of everything – we noted there was clearly no way the current owner could generate that sort of income, so the ‘Everything must go’ clearance signs duly went up.
What would come next? Our money was probably on a food place of some kind, given the sheer size of the unit (and similar plans reported by Lavender-Hill.uk a few doors down, where part of the Party Store is becoming Rudy’s Pizza). So it was maybe a surprise that the store – after a long overdue internal and external refit, to replace the lighting, flooring, shelving and everything – is reopening as more or less the same store, as the Clapham Discount Store.
The new sign even has the same listings either side, with a slight reordering, and the hard-to-define “Fancy Goods” – with it distinctively old-fashioned feel – replaced with “Kitchen Ware“.
It’s unfortunate that they’ve done the usual thing of mixing up Clapham with Battersea / Clapham Junction (which no doubt will infuriate some), but overall the place has had the spruce-up it needed, and looks good to trade. In the past the Red Setter made the confusion originally but quickly corrected it and replaced its “Clapham” board with one reading “Battersea”; meanwhile, Peabody refused to acknowledge the mistake and stubbornly declared that it was to avoid confusion with the train station (sic!).
- Read our previous stories:
This may not be the end of the story though.
The original listing for the premises advertised the large basement (covering pretty much the same areas as the main floor, and only really used for storage) as potentially available separately for £22,000 a year. There’s no way any one would want to waste that sort of money on a general storage area – especially when the space is slightly above ground and could fairly easily be split off with separate access, to serve as one of any number of business types (basement bar, small gym, whatever…).
And sure enough, a planning application has just gone in for “Subdivision of existing ground floor retail unit with basement storage into two retail units including new shop front.”
Chances are more changes are ahead…
This article was originally published on lavender-hill.uk.
