We're Shopping...

We’re shopping…

As the Pet Shop Boys said, everything’s for sale. The trouble is that round here, the shops themselves are for sale. Not only shops, but pubs as well, in fact pubs in particular. On our small stretch of the Harrow Road we have recently lost the Neeld Arms, the Windsor Castle and the Prince of Wales, while a couple of blocks away the Chippenham Hotel (with its gorgeous interior of faience and mirrors) seems doomed, as it has been bought by the people who illegally demolished the Carlton Tavern, just up the road in Maida Vale.

Ex-pubs

The Neeld Arms commemorates the family who developed the area a hundred and fifty years ago; they were Wiltshire landowners, hence Chippenham Road. It is now to become fancy flats (“The Marylands Apartments”); I hope the prospective owners enjoy their proximity to the Paddington Fish Bar.

The Windsor Castle, with its battlemented façade, is a distinctive building, and has been closed for some time, pending development. The city council turned down an application to make it into an “aparthotel”, but clearly it isn’t going to be a pub again. It hosted music back in the seventies, and I’m told The Clash played early gigs there. A man on the 18 bus told me it used to have extended licensing hours, like a market pub, but I can’t see why that should ever have been the case.  It is certainly a building with a history. Curiously there seems to be a concentration of pubs with “castle” in their name around Paddington, but more of that another day.

The Prince of Wales is our current major talking point, as community action has, for the moment, thwarted an attempt to open a betting shop on its ground floor. It is a more than local landmark, standing on an important junction, where Elgin Avenue and Great Western Road meet the Harrow Road, and is an acknowledged bus destination. The building is adorned with an enormous relief of the Prince of Wales' feathers high up on the corner, and despite the council's best efforts to rename it Maida Hill Piazza, the spot is still generally called Prince of Wales Junction. The pub closed a few months ago when the Council revoked its licence after the licensee was convicted of a serious sexual assault on the premises. It’s not entirely clear why the owner doesn’t want it to be a pub any more, except, presumably, that he can make more money by selling up. So we ended up with BetFred applying for a licence for a betting shop.

BetFred

Now you may not know BetFred, but they are a business founded by a Mancunian, Fred Done (and his brother Peter) and are the most innovatively-run betting shop chain. They bought the Tote when that was privatised four years ago, which is how they came to acquire their present shop on Harrow Road (by the bus stop near Sutherland Avenue). Now when publicly-owned the Tote used to support horseracing in various ways, but BetFred has largely withdrawn from that. Fred Done apparently prefers football.  

Opposing the granting of a betting shop licence is quite a tricky task, because you have to convince the authorities that a new betting shop would actually increase crime and disorder. It isn’t enough to say that there are enough betting shops already, (three within fifty yards) or that they are obviously parasitical and sucking the blood of the poor. The bookmaking chains vehemently deny that they are targeting the poor and vulnerable, but it is perfectly clear to anyone with eyes to see that, in London at any rate, the presence of multiple betting shops functions as an index of the economic deprivation of an area. You can expect fried-chicken shops, payday loan shops and pound shops as well. To be fair to the bookmakers (“the leisure industry” as they like to style themselves) I expect that their policy for shop openings is based more on the cost of leases than on any targeting of the vulnerable. The thing is that betting shops are looking like an increasingly old-fashioned way of doing business now that gambling is so readily available online, so margins must be getting tight and hence shops with cheap leases are the way to go. Obviously the fact that Harrow Road has a relatively high proportion of residents who don’t have access to the internet at home is also a positive factor. So it’s not quite fair to say that the bookmakers target the vulnerable; it’s more collateral damage.

The main point that the community raised against BetFred was that there was a record of crime and disorder centred on one of the existing shops at Prince of Wales Junction, and that it was reasonable to suppose that this would only increase with another shop. The counsel for BetFred made the pleasing point that fights and drug dealing outside a betting shop were evidence that the shop was actually well-run, because the manager was ensuring that those activities didn’t take place inside his premises! He also asserted that crime and anti-social activity were the result of the neighbourhood harbouring a number of unsavoury individuals, and really nothing to do with the betting shops.

Temptation

Now it would be foolish to say that there is a necessary causal link between any betting shop and crime, but it’s more about climate and opportunity.  The presence of places dedicated to offering financial gain without any actual productive work is bound to create a particular climate, and it is not surprising that they should be especially attractive in communities where paid work is scarce. The prospect of disproportionate financial returns is an attractive one for any investor, but the reason this becomes immoral in a deprived district is that the temptation becomes greater the more desperate you are, and if you have no spare cash then losing has really serious consequences. 

Yes, of course nobody has to bet, it’s always a decision you make, just as you decide to drink, smoke or take drugs, but like those you can become addicted to it. It’s a temptation you may or may not be able to resist, and sadly that’s not just a question of lacking moral fibre. Like other addictions too, gambling can be presented in such a way as to lure people in, which clearly happens (and which legislation around alcohol and tobacco recognises), and that presentation normalises it. The difference is that while the others can only ever make you temporarily feel better, gambling offers you the illusion that you can actually escape from desperate circumstances, and so is somehow morally more insidious.  

It is, then, particularly perverse that a government that is so keen to end a “something for nothing” culture should also be keen on liberalising controls over gambling, which is absolutely predicated upon getting something for nothing. But then you could say that much of what takes place in the City is just gambling but with no sport involved. You might also observe that betting industry figures (Peter Done included) give lots of money to political parties.

Anyway, BetFred’s application was turned down, after much testimony about how many vulnerable people were liable to be affected. We thought this was a great victory for the public good, but the story now is that someone wants to open a payday loan shop on the premises!