A month ago we reported on the end of the Kitchen Shoppe after 20 years of trading. They were the sort of unglamorous-but-useful family run general household goods store you’ll find as a matter of course on most south London high streets, that will never exactly set the world on fire but which makes a steady turnover on fairly thin margins. We once had lots of similar shops, but the Kitchen Shoppe’s sheer staying power meant that the Kitchen Shoppe had ended up as the last-but-one of their kind in Clapham Junction. The range included DIY goods, cleaning products, small furnishings and accessories, buckets and storage boxes, art supplies, somewhat fluorescent plastic garlands, and of course pans, glassware, utensils and cookware.

The lease inevitably came to its end, and the premises went up for a new lease, at an asking rate just short of £90,000 a year. The Kitchen Shoppe had turned a modest profit over the years, but as an honest purveyor of low-priced household goods – and also, as some of our readers noted, very much as an ‘old school’ traditional retailer pre-dating the era when they were competing with online delivery of everything – we noted there was clearly no way the current owner could generate that sort of income, so the ‘Everything must go’ clearance signs duly went up.

What would come next? Our money was probably on a food place of some kind, given the sheer size of the unit (and similar plans we’ve reported on a few doors down, where part of the Party Store is becoming Rudy’s Pizza). So it was maybe a surprise that the store – after a long overdue internal and external refit, to replace the lighting, flooring, shelving and everything – is reopening as more or less the same store, as the Clapham Discount Store:

The new sign even has the same listings either side, with a slight reordering, and the hard-to-define “Fancy Goods” – with it distinctively old-fashioned feel – replaced with “Kitchen Ware“. It’s mildly unfortunate that they’ve done the usual thing of mixing up Clapham with Battersea / Clapham Junction, but overall the place has had the spruce-up it needed, and looks good to trade.

This may not be the end of the story though. The original listing for the premises advertised the large basement (covering pretty much the same areas as the main floor, and only really used for storage) as potentially available separately for £22,000 a year. There’s no way any one would want to waste that sort of money on a general storage area – especially when the space is slightly above ground and could fairly easily be split off with separate access, to serve as one of any number of business types (basement bar, small gym, whatever…). And sure enough, a planning application has just gone in for “Subdivision of existing ground floor retail unit with basement storage into two retail units including new shop front.” Chances are more changes are ahead…

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. If you want to see or comment on the latest planning application to split the shop in two, visit Wandsworth’s planning database and search for application reference number 2025/1896. And if you’ve got tips or insights on any of the areas we cover – get in touch and let us know!