The sad death of Britain’s character shops

So farewell then Arthur Beale, you were the last of the great chandler shops. You and I had little in common…

This is how I imagine E.J. Thribb poem starting, and Private Eye’s Poetry Corner would do well to eulogise the passing of one of London’s most eccentric shops. It is to the credit of all Englishmen that a shop like Arthur Beale was able to survive into 2021. The audaciousness of running a chandlers on prime real estate in a notoriously expensive city, when the outboard motor was invented in 1870, does hint as to how we managed to beat the Germans twice. It is to our national shame that its Shaftesbury Avenue doors will be closing for good, a victim of the Coronavirus, and the unscrupulousness of landlords, who seem to know the price of everything but the value of nothing.