Celebrities rally to preserve Lamb’s Conduit Street
When a fast-expanding coffee chain seeks to open in one of Bloomsbury’s most distinctive streets, it is unlikely to get a warm welcome.
As soon as the news got out that Starbucks was to move into Lamb’s Conduit Street in September, at the corner of Great Ormond Street, alarm bells rang all around the area. The Campaign for an Independent Lamb’s Conduit Street was formed to oppose the move, calling Lamb’s Conduit an “historic street of independent retailers”. Many locals fear that rents will rise, forcing out independent shops.
The campaign claims that landlords Rugby Estate, an arm of Rugby School, waived a no-chains embargo without consultation and points out that several branches of Starbucks are already in easy walking distance of Lamb’s Conduit Street, among many more in the area:
“London is becoming so overrun with the ubiquitous coffee chain that within a 5km radius of Oxford Street, there are now a staggering 171 outlets, meaning at any given time you’re closer than ever before to the homogenised Starbucks experience.
“London’s latest victim of this plague is the fiercely independent community around Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury – a small area with an inordinately rich heritage: previous literary tenants alone include Charles Dickens, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf and Ted Hughes.”
However, both Jonathan Smith of Rugby School and Farebrother Chartered Surveyors, managers for the Rugby Estate, deny that there was ever a “no-chains agreement”.
Huw Colwyn Foulkes of Farebrothers said: “I would confirm that there has never been a policy by the school to have no "chains" in the street. The simple fact is that it has never attracted many in the past.”
He added: “We also do not have the luxury to pick and choose tenants as
we have a number of vacant units for which we have been seeking tenants for some time and the imperative is to get them let whether to independent traders or more substantial companies.”
Online petition
Determined to stop the chain, the campaign set up a website - http://www.lambsconduit.com and launched an online petition, expressing “deep concern” about the imminent arrival of Starbucks, with actor Rupert Everett and comedian Alexei Sayle among more than 1,000 signatories. The celebrity signatures helped generate a good deal of publicity for the anti-Starbucks campaign.
The campaign stresses the unique character of the street at a time when the issue of “cloned high streets” is already high on the national agenda. Lamb’s Conduit is described as “one of the jewels in Camden’s crown”, and “one of the most charming, unique and interesting shopping streets in London”.
Despite the campaign, Starbucks opened in the last week of August 2006.
Several shop owners and workers told Bloomsbury News of their concern. “It’s atrocious,” said the assistant manager of a nearby pub. Farhad Safa of Tutti’s, directly opposite the new Starbucks, fears that rents will start to soar.
Starbucks’ denies lack of community spirit
In a statement, Starbucks Coffee Company UK said:
“A respect for the local environment and the communities in which we do business is of paramount importance to Starbucks, and we aim for the look and feel of our stores to reflect their surroundings, and for our stores to be regarded as local community hubs.”
The statement denied that rents were likely to rise and asserted that “there is still plenty of room for both branded coffee shops and independents to happily coexist.”
Now that Starbucks has opened, Ash Ranpura, an organiser of the campaign, hopes that Lamb’s Conduit Street will be able to retain its “amazingly diverse” range of shops. “The loss of such a thriving, independent street to global chains would be a great loss for London.”