This post looks at a bundle of changes affecting traders at the end of Lavender Hill nearest Clapham Junction – including several of the most long-established local businesses. The first change is at the Kitchen Shoppe – which has been trading for over 20 years, and is one of the last remaining general household stores in Clapham Junction. They stock a product range that includes a selection of DIY goods, cleaning products, small furnishings and accessories, buckets and storage boxes, art supplies, a trademark feature of somewhat fluorescent floral garlands, and of course a big mix of kitchen equipment – pans, glassware, utensils, cookware, and the like. It’s up for lease, at just short of £90,000 a year, with the basement potentially available separately for £22,000. The Kitchen Shoppe has turned a modest profit over the years, but as an honest purveyor of household goods there’s no way the current owner can generate that sort of income for the premises, so the “Everything must go!” clearance signs have been put up. We understand the team is hunting for somewhere else to continue trading from, but the current location will close in the next couple of months. It’ll be sad to see the end of one of our original traders, after many years as maybe not the most fashionable or glamorous business in Clapham Junction, but an undeniably useful one run by a helpful and pragmatic team. This also really illustrates the way rental rates have been climbing up: despite all the talk of everything going online, rent costs keep climbing, and in a story that’s all too familiar, many of of our more established traders haven’t a chance when a major lease renewal and the associated huge jump in rent arrives.

So what happens next? The Kitchen Shoppe premises at 248-250 Lavender Hill is a big one in a busy location, and it also has a sizeable basement. For slightly complicated historic reasons (which we’ll write a future post on in our local history series), the building goes much deeper than the neighbours, and cuts in to what would logically have been the back gardens of the terrace of houses on Mossbury Road. This means at 3,700 square feet, it’s far too big for some retailers, and would be more in the size range for a Tesco Express-type supermarket… if it wasn’t for being a rather complicated shape – spread over two levels (2,500 square feet on the ground floor, itself split to two levels, with the rest in large basement area), a relatively complicated situation when it comes to delivery access, and also the area being somewhat saturated with food stores (Tesco are the only big chain not to already have a store in the immediate vicinity – and they’re moving their not-too-distant Falcon Road store this weekend to a rather larger unit across the road, so won’t want another this close).

This probably means food and drink use is a more likely outcome here – as there’s easily the space for a kitchen and a decent size dining area. It’s a growth sector for a busy and fairly wealthy town centre like Clapham Junction, and there aren’t that many places of this size available around the station. If this looks like the place for you, you’ll want to contact Galaxy Real Estate.

Change are also afoot at the Party Superstore, who have been trading on Lavender Hill since 1994 (and who gained a degree of fame when it was completely destroyed in the 2011 London riots, costing its owner Duncan Mundell over £200,000 – only to bounce back within weeks in space lent by Debenhams next door, and later reopen in the Lavender Hill unit bigger and brighter than ever). We wrote a whole separate post about this particular set of plans a week ago, and there’s much more detail included there – but in short our mini investigation suggests at least part of the unit may be becoming branch of Rudy’s Pizza, whose core product is classic Italian pizzas made with fresh dough in a Neapolitan-style base with a variety of toppings, including vegan and vegetarian options. They’re a small chain with 30 or so branches – including the one in Soho pictured below.

Further up Lavender Hill, high street plastic surgery chain sk:n closed very suddenly last summer when the entire business folded overnight, to the surprise of many of its staff and customers, many of whom were part way through prepaid treatments when it all fell apart. It seems the lingering impact of a complete shutdown during the pandemic, coupled with many customers having tighter budgets, and rapid growth in the sector that had maybe led to too many people offering these services, got the better of it. After several months of closure the good news is that part of the business has found a buyer in the form of Lorena Cosmetics Holdings, who have reopened a cluster of the 70 original branches (re-hiring about 150 of the previous staff in doing so) – including the one at 263 Lavender Hill.

Further along Lavender Hill, Sugar Cane bar has been sold – after owner Alfred Zega decided that after 17 years it was time to move on. The business and the lease of the premises was put on the market last year as a going concern for an up front payment of around £100k. Again this is a big place – with a capacity for around 100 customers standing and 80 seated, as well as a basement club with a capacity of about 70. It’s a busy place with an annual turnover of around £740,000 net of VAT. A 25-year lease, of which five years remain, will transfer onto the new owner who would then take on rent at £80,000 per annum.

The business was sold by Christie & Co; and the buyer is A Taste of Africa Limited, a newly created hospitality business. There’s not much information out there on who the buyers are, but they have been reported to be experienced bar and restaurant operators, who plan to bring in a new offering to the market. This means the bar is set for change – but ultimately this will remain a business that sets out to deliver a strong late-night experience

Over on St John’s Road, we’ll be seeing a new branch of Pepe’s Piri Piri at No. 18 – a small unit that has had a lot of uses in recent years including an opticians and a travel agent – it’s the one that is STA Travel in the rather vintage Google Street View photo above. Pepe’s have a loosely similar range to Nando’s, including their own range of sauces – but a more takeaway focus, which is just as well as the unit is pretty small – the proposed frontage from the planning application is shown below. They have been growing fast via a franchise model, and have just over 200 stores around the UK, including 40 or so in London, with the nearest current in Balham.

Bear with us for a short historical detour. A little known fact about the premises is that this rather shabby row of small buildings are among the oldest houses in Clapham Junction; they were a little terrace of farm workers’ cottages way before the railways arrived, when this was all fields; the Falconbrook river flowed along their back gardens, with a farm track in front. The map below shows the layout in the very early days of Clapham Junction station, with both front gardens & the still-not-buried Falconbrook river visible.

Maybe surprisingly, these particular shops are also locally listed buildings. The picture below shows them in the late 1800s when shop extensions had been built in their front gardens. The one with the awning saying G.J Brown, Bucher is he one that’s set to become Pepe’s, it is still just about recognisable even though the shop has gained a second storey.

Back on the subject of local businesses – the former Fitness First that (as we reported at the time) closed very suddenly back at the end of 2023, and whose future had been a bit of a mystery, is now well on the way to reopening. It’ll still be a gym, this time run by Anytime Fitness – who already run lots of gyms all over London and around the country; their nearest current branches are in Clapham Park and Acre Lane so maybe it’s not surprising they pounced on the opportunity to take over this large and well-presented building, that offers three big open floors with lots of natural light. The site had new windows fitted last year, and a fair bit of internal work has been going on, with early membership sales ongoing.

Mystery surrounds the future of the Sports bar and Grill next to The Falcon pub – which has vanished, after five years in business. We’ve seen some minor signs of activity inside, but there’s not much sign of either a refit, or of the property being up for lease. This is a big, expensive space in one of the busiest bits of the town centre; let us know if you know what’s going on here.

Much the same goes for the former William Hill at 164 Falcon Road (also known as Unit 13 of Shopstop, as despite being somewhat detached, it is linked to the shopping centre at the station). We posted way back in 2019 about the sudden disappearance of almost all the betting shops on Lavender Hill, drive mainly by changes in rules on fixed-odds betting machines. All the shops in question quickly found new tenants – well, all except this one, which has been vacant for more than five years! The landlord’s on the hook for business rates for the empty premises (over £15,000 a year!), which makes it strange that they’ve not even put a popup charity shop in here just to keep the place ticking over more cheaply. It is ‘To Let’, and while it’s on a rather trafficky corner it is in a very busy spot, a 900-square-foot unit here should normally be very lettable, even if at circa £75k a year it’s not a cheap option. If this is the space for you, get in touch with Forge or JLL…

And finally as sister site Clapham Junction Insider has reported, the biggest site of all, W.RE’s redevelopment of the Debenhams / Arding & Hobbs site, has found the first major tenant for the new and very smart office space on the top floors, as workspace provider x+why take over the whole of the third floor. They will be one of the office tenants; but they will also operate the building’s amenities including the roof terrace and front-of-house services. They plan for a range of memberships (starting at about £400/month), with the possibility of renting spaces for special events, and booking spaces even when not working regularly on the third floor. As a business already managing over 430,000 square feet of flexible office, meeting and events spaces, reception and club space buildings across ten sites in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Milton Keynes, this is a solid start for the last piece of the Arding & Hobbs jigsaw, and speaks to the strong confidence in the overall town centre.

Update (April) – In a bit of good news we hear that both the Kitchen Shoppe, and the Party Superstore, could potentially be continuing to trade in smaller parts of the current shops. The planning application for the Party Superstore still hasn’t properly activated (maybe because of technical issues, maybe because relevant documents are still needed).

We post from time to time on retail developments in the Lavender Hill area of Battersea, London – if you found this of interest you may want to see our other recent posts on retail and on food and drink in the area, or to sign up to receive new posts by email. And if you’ve got tips or insights on any of the areas we cover – get in touch and let us know!