Walk of Shame

The death of St. George's Walk wasn't sudden. It wasn't even particularly dramatic. It died the way many great British institutions die: slowly, apologetically and under the supervision of a planning committee.

By the end, it felt less like a shopping precinct than a cutscene from one of the Fallout video games. Half-empty units stared across at completely empty units. The great concrete ambitions of the 1960s sat beneath the looming shadow of Nestlé Tower, which itself looked to have been on the receiving end of a series of successful drone strikes.

St. Georges walk occupied a space seen in towns up and down the UK – one of those secondary parades whose glory days faded and dimmed and then got stuck in a sort of temporal aspic, a twilight for a night that would never quite come.

In the 1970s and 1980s it certainly occupied a peculiar niche in Croydon life. It wasn't the Whitgift Centre, with its endless flow of shoppers and chain stores. Nor was it Surrey Street, where commerce retained a pleasing medieval whiff of organised shouting.

It was simultaneously unique and recognisable: a mish-mash of architectural styles covering the entire gamut of the late sixties to, ooh, the mid sixties. It housed a collection of independent traders, specialists, eccentrics and entrepreneurs who seemed to have opened shops because normal employment had somehow failed them; a very Croydon mindset.

You entered from the High Street between two landmarks. On one side stood H.R. Cloake's record shop, a place of worship for anyone under the age of twenty-five and carrying a carrier bag full of unrealised musical ambitions. You could spend entire afternoons examining album covers and pretending to understand jazz fusion. Generations of Croydon teenagers discovered obscure bands there and immediately became insufferable. Or maybe they just came to ram another 10p into the Scramble arcade machine by the door.

On the other side sat the Mad House, which specialised in the sort of fashion that could only have existed during the 1980s, despite managing to hang on for a good couple of decades more. Stonewashed jeans hung from every available surface, alongside t-shirts in Mondrian primary colours. Casuals browsed with the seriousness of military procurement officers. Entire diplomatic incidents could probably have been avoided had world leaders been required to discuss matters while wearing acid-wash denim. It was one of those places that had “Closing Down Sale!” posters in the windows from the day it opened, and surprised the hell out of everybody when it actually did.

If you managed to drag yourself past these too lures – not easy, not easy – you’d find yourself in a place that possessed the atmosphere of a small independent republic – a republic that was amply fed and watered by the good folks at the Pannino (later Piccolino) café. As I kid, I only had eyes for the milkshakes; their menu appeared to contain every possible flavour and more than a few that were definitely not in the Crusha range – rhubarb, caramel, hazelnut.

The milkshakes were magnificent; the mugs were less so. Every single one appeared to have suffered some form of attack, with the rims riddled with mysterious chips and bite marks. You could never determine whether previous customers had chewed them absent-mindedly or whether the café had adopted an unusually liberal policy regarding dogs, and possibly wolverines. It certainly added character, if not actual tetanus.

Whitecross Trade Sales may well have been a reincarnation of Winn Dixie – a close-out shop where the supply chain logistics seemed to involve wormholes. You might enter intending to buy a saucepan and leave carrying a plastic helicopter, a set of novelty ashtrays and an inflatable crocodile.

Boxes of rub-down transfers sat beside chipped crockery and discount kitchenware. Nearby you could find second-hand pornographic mags whose imagery suggested entirely different forms of rub-down activity.

Such activity was never far from the menu at Pasta San Giorgio. This was St George's Walk's attempt at – don’t snigger – sophistication. It aspired to continental elegance but somehow landed somewhere between a motorway service station and the 1984 TV advert for Bezique. The décor and menu hinted at Sorrento, but the reality was firmly Surrey.

Still, it was popular, particularly among middle managers conducting romantic negotiations with office typists over the garlic mushrooms. The conversations drifting from its tables had a desperate quality; you could almost hear the company car being discussed. Heady stuff: a mixture of Asti Spumante (“I only like the expensive stuff”) and temporary secs – How many careers and marriages died in that place?

One of the delights of St George's Walk was its scale. There were businesses so small they barely qualified as premises. Most memorable was the stamp shop and the chocolatier occupied roughly half a unit each. They existed side-by-side like neighbouring principalities. The stamp dealer's domain contained tiny paper rectangles worth astonishing amounts of money, while the chocolatier's kingdom contained tiny chocolate rectangles worth astonishing amounts of money.

Both attracted customers possessed of specialist knowledge and surprisingly strong opinions, all too ready to slap down their Access Card and walk away with a tiny fragment of history or a tiny step along the path to diabetes.

The entire precinct felt like an accidental collaboration between market traders, collectors, dreamers and mildly unreliable businessmen. The modern world prefers certainty, though, and when the hallowed name of “Westfield” started being whispered in the ears of the money brokers – possibly in a booth in San Giorgio – the writing was on the wall for St. George’s Walk. Although it was hard to spot amidst the graffiti.

Developers began circling. Redevelopment schemes emerged, disappeared and re-emerged under different names. Businesses suddenly found themselves living instead under a permanent cloud of uncertainty. Inevitably, any hope of investment stalled – traders left, and the number of empty units multiplied. What had once been eccentric started looking looking the way older eccentrics tend to go: disheveled and neglected and shouting obscenities in a nearby shapping centre. Except that in this case it actually was the shopping centre. By the 2000s the decline had become impossible to ignore, and the slow-motion demolition was played out like a particularly ponderous bit of Noh theatre.

It was a different sort of theatrics that gave St. George’s Walk a last shot in the arm. In 2018, Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch episode was filmed there, and for a few days at least it was transformed back into a version of its ‘80s self. Wimpy, WH Smith, Fads and other iconic shopfronts were built for the episode (Wimpy occupying the space of the former Whitecross shop) – none of these places had ever actually had a presence in St. George’s Walk, of course. If they had, the outcome might have been different.

And that was pretty much it. The cameras and lights were packed away and the bulldozers rolled in, levelling half of the precinct and leaving the left to moulder like the head of a tick left in a wound. Those usually heal up quickly, but sometimes fester and contribute to the illness or death of the host. Guess which analogy is most apt?