How a street of small businesses handled their business during a global pandemic
By Ryan Gray
Just a few months ago in Holloway, the streets were densely packed, with customers roaming in and out of shops freely as they pleased with not a care in the world.
All businesses along the street were open so that you could shop for vintage clothes or furniture, find necessary hardware or do your daily food shop.
The dizzying array of cafés and delicatessens welcomed visitors to eat, drink, and take the weight off of their feet.
On the 23rd March, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the UK would begin lockdown, after previously closing all physical businesses down to ease the spread of the virus. Only essential businesses were left open for the public’s once-a-day use.
As countless people lost their jobs on the 20th March due to the hospitality industry shut down nationwide. Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced at the same time the £30bn Job Retention Scheme (JRS), in which employers could “furlough” staff, and still receive 80% of their wages.
In a poll of 5,300, businesses from the Office for National Statistics recorded that 0.4% ceased trading within the first two weeks of lockdown, 38% recorded trading “substantially lower,” and 17% were “slightly lower”.
With only 5% of businesses now open on Holloway, what is it like living in lockdown for business owners – and how has the virus affected their livelihoods?
A new makeover
Rincon Quiteño, an Ecuadorian café across from London Metropolitan University on Holloway Road, has been owned by Luis Torres and his family for the past 23 years. “It’s been entertaining over that time in here working every day. I have some days off,” says Torres with a big laugh.
When lockdown began, he decided to give the café a makeover. Torres says that the café “needed some kind of uplifting and that’s what we did”.
He realised that the previous layout of the café would not be beneficial for new social distancing measures as tables were too close together and people would come into contact with one another.
Now, the new layout puts tables at the front and sits the kitchen way at the back of the building.
“The new layout of the restaurant will help best, it’s more to do with how hygienic it is for everybody, so no walking into the room with plates,” says Torres.
The new layout will be safer for both customers and staff. Torres also says the newly updated bar is at the back as it’s “more connected to the kitchen, so everything will be plated from the kitchen to the tables”.
Torres is worried, however, as his café has fallen on hard times financially as a result of the lockdown. He says “since the closure it has been zero money, even before that we were already suffering on sales because of competition”.
Competition in the area is rife, he says, “but yes, we hope, we hope we come back big after renovation”.
Torres says with a small burst of joy that “from tomorrow we are just a take-away,” but as the joy dissipates, he goes on to say that they are “just following on the rules as the government is saying yes, whatever they may be.
“The social distancing rules don’t lie on me; they lie on the government.”
Torres believes that by July, he should be more or less back to normal in terms of his customers and his renovations will beat the street’s fierce competition that he’s spent 23 years competing against.
Alongside the new look is a new menu. “It will be a delicious smaller menu because of the impact of the business, but yes, that’s my hope. We will also be having a better display of cocktails, coffees too, but now I’m looking into more of it is a restaurant that a café,” says Torres.
Making the best of a bad situation
“I pretty much own this place,” says 32-year-old Kaski Ukaj, owner of The Barn Café on Holloway Road.
The rustic café sells an assortment of breakfast and lunch meals, hot plates, salads, coffees, and cold drinks, with all produce locally sourced and organic.
Ukaj says that through the retention scheme to help businesses in lockdown, he “had a bit of money from the government”, but it was not a lot a large amount. “We would have made more money basically if we were open,” he admits.
Ukaj says that he worries for his staff’s future during the re-opening period, “I don’t know what the hell is gonna happen with them because it’s quiet as hell, man.”
Even when he opens for customers “it’s gonna be hard for them,” as there will be very few customers inside than before, which inevitably means less shifts for staff or the possibility of losing staff.
The current layout sits the till and coffee machine next to the door, which provides the “opportunity to sell coffee and cakes to passers-by in the street” in an attempt to gain a new form of normality.
Ukaj says that his attempt to transform the social distancing changes in his café will go ahead before “the government re-open more places on the 15th June”. He says that he’s been open for three weeks on his own for take-away only selling ‘sandwiches and cakes’, but has been a slow, ‘very quiet’ three-weeks for Ukaj.
“As you see man, it’s dead,” he says.
Keeping it mobile
Moving to online
After working for retail shops in Holloway, 22-year-old art student Noah Thompson-Holbourns set about to create his own online business in Holloway called ‘NoahsArchive’.
With physical businesses shut down, Thompson-Holbourns moved his business to a completely online platform since the announcement of lockdown, and the move improved his business.
From buying bags of clothes from charity and vintage shops along Holloway Road, “sales have increased surprisingly,” he says. “I’ve gone up almost double in sales per week.”
Thompson-Holbourns put his vision out there through buy-and-sell clothing app Depop, where you can sell your unwanted clothing items that you impulsively bought and can over time develop it into a business.
“Depop isn’t my primary income but one day I would like it to be as it would make it easier to focus on less things,” says Thompson-Holbourns.
He now has over 5,000 followers and has amassed an amount of clothes so large that he’s had to rent out another room in his shared flat to accommodate it all. He calls it his “office” and “base of operations”.
“I am now sourcing my stock online and have has some friends message me offering me some stock,” he says, “but it’s going to be tough without shops and car-boots for a while.”
Many businesses in the area and across the UK now face the biggest financial crisis since 1920. Concerns about their future are looming over their heads and there are no defined guidelines set out by the government to re-open, making the future of small business looks to be clouded in confusion. But it is up to the public to help our small business by shopping in them more frequently, and to see a return to a new kind of normal.
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