Gerald Green

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THE man who ran the linen shop just behind Oxford Circus had it right about what would happen to the West End.

Of course, it didn’t take a retail Nostradamus to spell it out, but as Gerald Green closed up The Linen Cupboard in Great Castle Street for the last time he explained that useful shops were being replaced with places to eat. Loads of them, endless places to fill our faces.

That was 10 years ago this week and his charming, independent store was in the process of calling time on nearly 50 years in the street.

Vanity Fair no less had called the business “irreplaceable” and it had billed itself as “the last speciality linen” shop in London, stocking items that would be nearly impossible to source elsewhere.

The trouble with being the “last” of anything, of course, is that there must have been a reason the others had disappeared over the years.

There had once been seven, maybe more, fine linen shops in Oxford Street but food earns more than luxury bedding, a fact which even John Lewis was coming to realise at the time of Mr Green’s farewell.

The Linen Cupboard, which closed 10 years ago this week

Mr Green, whose father had also sold linen, said back then – and Harrington fully concurs today – that “the West End is in danger of becoming one big restaurant”, adding: “In the past 25 yearsJohn Lewis have opened three restaurants, BHS have two restaurants and there is a multitude of different individual restaurants which have opened up. And, of course, the coffee bars.”

British Home Stores and a different Mr Green weren’t saved by food, but he was on the right track.

As it happened, the unit where The Linen Cupboard used to be now has neon lights offering Japanese barbecue food.

It’s easy to say that we’d all love a useful high street near our homes and, more widely, a trip to the West End to be rewarded with stops at interesting independent shops.

The internet has distorted such a romantic vision.

But pretending the only thing wrong with this key part of the city is the traffic and the shady sweet shops masks the fact that, even if you dealt with those issues, you’d still be left with an infinite parade of places to spend £15 on – ready lunches in a box.

How dull.