William Martyn's shop on Muswell Hill Broadway is a true blast from the past and not necessarily from my past. As it happens, I do dimly remember the pre-supermarket days of biscuits-by-the-pound grocery stores, blood-and-sawdust butchers' shops, and the metallic kerchung of manual cash registers. But this place, this "retailer of fine food", has been around since 1897. My mother, indeed my grandmother, would come over all nostalgic were they to step across the threshold of this time-warped north London shop.
It's the smell that hits me first (a rich smell of roasting coffee beans laced with dried fruit, sugar and French polish), followed by a flood of memories. The shop's dark, stained-wood interior, the wooden floors, the wooden shelves (stacked to the ceiling with tins, cartons, jams and sweet jars) take me back to early childhood. As do the sweets (humbugs, cinnamon balls, liquorice comfits) and the groceries (Symingtons Table Cream, Heatherslaw Tipsy Cake, glacé fruits, jars of duck fat and trays of loose dried apricots, weighed out on ancient brass scales).
A 1950s coffee roaster rumbles away in the window. At the back of the shop, William Martyn himself, the great-grandson of the original W. Martyn, stands behind an old-fashioned pay desk, a kind of hole-in-the-wall serving hatch, framed by dried herbs. Behind the desk, he shows me what's left of some original wallpaper and a faded 1930s photograph of the shop's interior. "As you can see, it's almost intact," he says. "We have lost the old ceiling and the lighting but all the fixtures and fittings are just as they were in the 19th century."
W. Martyn is the only original, family run premises left on Muswell Hill's Victorian shopping parade but shops of its age and ilk are now a rarity on any high street, in any city, anywhere in Britain. Having survived two world wars, they are losing the battle against the corporate giants as they struggle to meet increasingly high rents. They are an endangered breed, dwindling in number, almost on a daily basis. Indeed, the government's all-party Small Shops Campaign predicts that, at the current rate of closure, the independent shop could be extinct by 2015. Yet they can, and do, survive.
The key to survival, according to Martyn, is specialising (30 blends of teas, 20 different types of fresh-roasted coffee). He's also big on good old-fashioned values. "We pride ourselves on family issues, we meet and greet people, we have time to help our elderly customers, we deliver." And he reckons he can equal the supermarkets on price and better them on personal service. "Service is about counting change back into people's hands," he tells me. "Not slapping it down on the counter."
Many of his customers, he admits, are on the elderly side but he is attracting a growing crowd of "young food buffs" looking for a non-supermarket shopping experience. "They want a pickle that's full of fruit or a jam that's got jam in it and they want advice on what they are buying."
The younger generation is discovering the joys of old-fashioned shopping for other reasons. Interior designer Sally Venables loves the aesthetic qualities of such vintage retail premises. She revels in their original features, their social history and retro charm. And she found so many stalwarts in the capital that she was inspired to write a book about them. The recently published Still Open: The Guide to Traditional London Shopsfeatures more than 70 "shops that time forgot", scattered all over the city.
Featuring shops such as Allen & Co (an ornately tiled Victorian butchers' shop in back-street Mayfair) and Arthur Beale (a 100-year-old yacht chandlers in, of all places, Shaftesbury Avenue), it reveals a disappearing legacy of time-warped grocers, hatters, shoemakers, barbers, pie shops and classic cafés. In pages of evocative colour photography, it suggests a thriving retail world of etched glass, panelled wood, mosaic tiles and apothecary bottles. Out on the streets, though, finding these treasures is rather like looking for a little old lady lost in a noisy nightclub - you have to shoulder your way through gangs of Carphone Warehouses, Tesco Metros, Gaps and Starbucks to find them. You can see just how vulnerable these old treasures are.
James Smith & Sons on New Oxford Street is an extraordinary relic of the 1860s. Specialising in umbrellas and "gentleman's canes", it is a pavement-to-rooftop spectacle of red and gold lettering. Inside, it is a genteel oasis, a sanctuary from the roar of double-decker buses.
I find glass signs, hunting trophies on the wall, brass-handled drawers and two umbrella-makers, sitting in the corner of the shop, stitching the hemmed skirts of hand-made brollies. Manager Jonathan Ward shows me round. "This is our most expensive umbrella," he says, producing a slender black roll of waterproof fabric on a rosewood handle, priced at £525. "We do cheap ones as well," he adds, producing an £8.99 number.
He explains that "we are like a perfumier who also sells bars of soap. We wouldn't have survived this long by being too upmarket." Upmarket custom is, nonetheless, its comfort zone. Neither would it survive without collectors (the kind of collector willing to pay handsomely for an antique cane or a stick carved from "exceedingly rare" Caribbean hardwood), or overseas visitors, particularly Americans, for whom shops like this one (which is, incidentally, Grade II listed) represent the quintessence of little olde England.
My next stop is Jermyn Street, where I peer into the dark, almost gloomy interior of Bates - a 1920s gents' hat shop housed in a former hotel lobby. It is lined with hat boxes, rows of fedoras and towers of tweed flat caps. "We sell hundreds of them," I am told. Before I leave, I read the notice beneath the stuffed ginger cat, which sits in a glass case on the wall. "Binks", it says, strolled in as a kitten in November 1926.
Around the corner in St James's Street, in luxury brands territory, it is not so surprising to find old-fashioned niche market stores. Here is James Lock & Co (a traditional milliners, established in 1676 and said to be one of the oldest family run businesses in the world).
Almost next door is John Lobb, "Bootmaker to Her Majesty the Queen". The latter, with its high panelled walls, mahogany cabinets and leather chairs, is a cross between a gentleman's club and the Victoria and Albert museum.
Brogues and riding boots furnish the glass cases and shoe boxes line the stairwell. Downstairs, J. Lobb stores hundreds of foot-shaped wooden shoe lasts.
"We've no reason to change," says current owner John Hunter Lobb, who still has the lasts his family's firm made for Frank Sinatra, Lord Olivier and "that blackguard" Robert Maxwell. "Most of our competitors went over to ready-made shoes years ago but we've stuck it out." The appeal of buying a bespoke product in such splendid surroundings continues to delight discerning customers, I suggest. Yes, agrees Lobb, "and they like to buy shoes that actually fit."
According to Esquire magazine, John Lobb is "the most beautiful shop in London". But even the most beautiful, the most listed shops in London, can be endangered, as was the case for T. Fox, on London Wall, near Moorgate Station. Another posh umbrella shop, this one a rare jazz-era classic dressed in chrome and black Vitrolite, curved glass and red neon, Fox was founded in 1868. Aside from a change of ownership in 1880, and a radical art deco refit in 1936, nothing much altered.
Six years ago, however, Fox, which claims to have invented the steel-framed umbrella, was sold to a buyer who first tried to drive the shop downmarket and then went bankrupt. It has since been saved by new owner Rory O'Shaughnessy, a former manager of Simpson-Daks, who bought the shop out of receivership. Believing that Fox's unique atmosphere and retro façade are part of its fortune, he set about restoring the listed interior (with art deco fixtures salvaged from the Unilever building in Blackfriars, London) and successfully set his sights on a discerning, high-spending client. Returning to its roots, the emphasis is on luxury-brand men's accessories (Fox's bestselling umbrella retails at £229).
Others have not been so lucky or, perhaps, so shrewd. When Sally Venables started researching her book she zipped round the city on a scooter, looking for likely candidates, but soon discovered she needed a time machine to catch up with the speed of their demise.
Bonds of Oxford Street, a traditional pipes-and-shag tobacconist, was destined for her book but closed before it was published; as did Blagdens fish shop in Marylebone, and Notarianni & Sons, a 1950s ice cream parlour in Battersea High Street. Other suvivors are, she says, "struggling".
A few are listed, thereby protecting for posterity the shop's character or, as English Heritage would say, "the integrity of the street architecture". The less fortunate may face extinction, not just as an independent shop but as a little corner of museum-quality retail history, destined to be swamped in plastic signs and illuminated fascias - another Phones4U, perhaps, or a Sainsbury's Local, or a Costa Coffee, adding in the process to the tedious sameness of High Street UK.
"Period shops are incredibly vulnerable from a conservation point of view," agrees Kathryn Morrison, author of English Shops and Shopping, which traces the history of retailing from 16th-century guild halls to Festival of Britain dress shops and modern supermarkets. She mourns the passing of traditional shopfronts and the gradual homogenisation of the high street but is philosophical about the process. As her book suggests, the arguments about retail conservation, the outcries over redevelopment, have been with us for more than 100 years.
"Shop architecture is by nature ephemeral," she explains. "Fashions change more quickly than in any other sphere of architecture."
Morrison is a senior investigator at English Heritage and her book was based on a detailed survey of retail buildings, past and present. In the book's conclusion, she predicted a rise in internet shopping and an expansion of out-of-town shopping malls. But, in the seven years since the survey was commissioned and the three years since the book was published, there has, she concedes, been another less predictable trend: the slow revival of the traditional, niche market shop.
This could be a byproduct of the farmers market phenomenon - the rising popularity of independent traders selling high quality goods. It could also be interpreted as a subtle backlash against the multiples and not just against their rising presence but their uncompromising corporate appearance, their impersonal chip-and-pin style. More likely, it's a reflection of the growth of shopping as an experience or leisure activity. A quaint old shop interior, beautifully preserved, can enhance that experience.
The Howard de Walden estate, which owns or manages roughly 90 acres of west London property, certainly recognised this when it was involved in the revitalisation of Marylebone High Street a few years ago. According to De Walden's chief executive Andrew Ashenden, it deliberately set out to create a traditional high street populated with a group of small, "carefully selected" independent shops. "We didn't want a standard street, the national clone," he says. Fobbing off aggressive bids from the supermarket big boys, De Walden invited Waitrose as a starting point and then decided on which shops would be appropriate for the area, offering low starter rents to tempt small businesses.
It has since become one of London's favourite shopping streets. "It's all about tenant mix," says Ashenden. It's also about sensitive conservation. When Waitrose moved to Marylebone it was required to retain the original premises, a case of slipping a modern supermarket behind a period shop-front.
Perhaps inspired by Marylebone's success, the borough of Kensington and Chelsea is now seeking ways of protecting its retail mix. It started, explains councillor Merrick Cockell, when Tesco took over Cullens, Europa and Harts, a small, popular, west London chain of neighbourhood delis two years ago. "In one case they installed the most garish, crude shop-front, right next to a Grade I listed building," he recalls. "The residents simply rose up in fury."
Around the same time, a vociferous group of residents and shopkeepers mounted a campaign to save Portobello Road from corporate colonisation. "There was a lot of gnashing of teeth," says Cockell. He is slightly woolly about how the borough, which covers the busy shopping areas of the King's Road, Sloane Square and Knightsbridge, plans to approach these issues. But a commission has been set up (with Terence Conran as one of its high-profile members) and there is talk of creating "retail conservation areas" (along the lines of protected shopping streets in Paris) or "finding some way" of offering lower than market rents to attract and sustain quirky, niche-market shops. "We hope to come up with an option that would be workable anywhere," says Cockell.
Meanwhile, the little treasures among London's independent shops struggle on alone, with differing, and often surprising, degrees of success. The classic café, for example, now has a modicum of cult status. Pellicci's in Bethnal Green, a postwar gem featured in Sally Venables' book, recently became the first Grade II listed caff, so a younger generation of Eastenders can still enjoy a home-cooked breakfast or steak and kidney pudding.
These stalwarts of St James', John Lobb and James Lock, are now both on the historic London tourist trail. Meanwhile, William Martyn has just ordered 28,000 W. Martyn tea cartons ("not for dusty powdery tea but leaf teas, green teas, fruit teas"). Being the old-fashioned English shop, the only one left on the street, is now the key to its survival. Martyn deliberately complements Marks and Spencer across the road (which doesn't sell Tipsy cake or dried figs but does draw people to the area). He does mail-order, deliveries and has just launched his first website. "It is," he says, "about having a few strings in the bow."
'Still Open' by Sally Venables with Steve Williams, photography by Brian Benson, (Black Dog, £12.95). 'English Shops and Shopping' by Kathryn A. Morrison (Yale University Press, £35)
