Five years ago I joined forces with some local worthies to object to the opening of a strip joint on Acton High Street. We weren’t successful, but the owner of the club decided to invite us all to the opening night. He claimed we’d got the wrong end of the stick. It wasn’t a sleazy lap-dancing club — oh no — but a ‘burlesque’ club. What this meant in practice is that the dancers had glued feathers to their micro bikinis. Apart from that it was business as usual.
The upshot was that I spent a couple of hours standing in the middle of a strip club trying to make small talk with about 20 middle-aged ladies, most of them Lib Dem activists, as a succession of topless women gyrated on stage. It took every ounce of willpower to maintain eye contact with these bluestockings and not let my gaze drift in the direction of the ‘burlesque’ performers.
Actually, to be fair, they soon got on to a topic that I found even more fascinating than the lap-dancers — the prospect of a Waitrose opening in East Acton. For residents of this corner of London, this is topic number one at dinner parties. Quite apart from Waitrose’s symbolic value as a sign of gentrification, it’s long overdue, because the first ever branch of Waite, Rose and Taylor opened on Acton Hill in 1904. For the local middle classes, this wouldn’t just be another supermarket opening, but the return of the prodigal son.
Fast-forward five years and the good burghers of Acton are up in arms again, this time about the proposed redevelopment of the Oaks, a shopping centre that connects Acton High Street to Churchfield Road. Now the Oaks is no great shakes. It’s full of pound shops and discount stores, the sort of retail substrata you’d expect to find in a depressed part of the north-east rather than in west London.
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