The long, slow death of the Londis.

Earlier this week, stories appeared in the Tiverton/Culm valley gazette and the Express and Echo regarding the imminent closure of the Londis store in the village square. The stories were based on interviews with one of the proprietors, Cristine Read and the basis of the story was that the Londis had been forced out of business by the growth in internet shopping. As most people in the village recognise the truth is somewhat otherwise.

There has been a general store on the site of the Londis, reputedly for some 200 years. When I was young, and for long before that, the shop was owned by the Perratt family and sold just about anything that most people would want. As with most general stores in the days before modern health, safety, and envioronmental legislation it was highly individual when it came to standards of hygene and many older Silvertonians will remember Mr Dibsdale with his drippy nose cutting up the bacon and the paraffin being stored next to the cheese. With the growth of the supermarkets and the rapid expansion in car ownership that accompanied the long post war economic boom, Perrats went the way of many such small village general stores and by the late 60s had been sold on to become a franchised convienience store, first owned by Vivo, then by SPAR and finally by Londis, now part of the Budgen group, I believe. A couple of years back, the Londis encountered serious opposition when Dave Haggett, the local butcher took over the newspaper shop next to the butchers and obtained a franchise from SPAR to reopen the shop as another convienience store.

The competition between the two shops set off quite a serious conflict within the village with peopledeclaring alliegence to one or other of the two stores. There were those who, whilst using one store would not set foot inside the other, and in the case of the Londis the situation was excacerbated by tyhe fact that there was quite a poor shopping environment with recurrent problems with air conditioning. The situation was not aided by the proprietors health problems. The shop went into a slow but steady decline leading to the eventual closure due on June 11th. Whilst the growth in Internet shopping certainly played some part in the downfall of the Londis, it was almost certainly not the key factor.

In my view two themes emerge from this sad saga, firstly, a clash between two business models, a traditional convienience store and a convienience store aiming at the upwardly mobile class that has increasingly come to dominate the village in the past thirty years. Given the changes in Shopping habits within the village and the inability of the Londis management to match the Haggett setup in terms of investment and business expertise there was only ever going to be one winner. Secondly, the Londis-Spar clash again illustrates the tensions between the old Silverton and the new that first became apparent with the demolition of the old village hall and the construction of the new community hall nearly twenty years ago. Cristine Read in her interview, unconciously recognised this in her interview when she pointed up her ancestral connections with the village. The reality now is however that appeals to to the traditional village community, many of whom loyally supported Londis to the end, cut little ice when set against changing economic realities and the continuing reinvention of Silverton as a dormitory village.