'It's Dead in Here'

Pam from the Cooperative Funeral Parlour at 80 Chatsworth Road has a good sense of humour. 'It's dead in here', she cackles, enjoying the pun. 'Even here we are suffering from lack of business. People have to register their deaths at the Town Hall in Mare Street where there is a co-op so we get left out. We do have a chapel of rest here but it is rather damp. The council planted a tree outside – we didn’t want it – it went through a gas main.'

Chatsworth Supermarket

Asif is the manager of the 24-hour Chatsworth Supermarket, which has an Eastern European Social & Snooker Club downstairs with a huge TV screen showing Turkish programmes and sport. “I used to run Altun across the road with my family. We did it for four years but it just became too hard, because of the long hours and too much competition on Chatsworth Road with so many shops selling the same thing. We were working 14, 15 and 16 hour days. I still work 12 or 13 hours six days a week.“

Cobblers

A dusty galosh dangles on one wall and an ancient platform boot swings from the ceiling next to a truncated Eiffel tower. Hanging above the counter stuffed full of cottons, elastics, screws and bits of paper is a single lime green cowboy boot, which remains unclaimed since the owner went into prison in 1972.

Claiming his is the oldest shop in the street, the owner, 75-year-old Suleyman from Cyprus bought the cobblers in 1967 and still makes and repairs shoes on the premises. Learning his trade as a shepherd in his home country, where he first crafted shoes under a tree looking after his herd, he brought his self-taught trade to London with him and has never stopped. ‘I love it. I have so much energy for shoes.’

'Many people who buy cheap shoes now don't want to pay for repairs; usually I make them pay first and still they don't come back'. His sign clearly says: 'We will only keep your shoes for three months', although one woman came back shouting: 'You lost my shoes' – after three years. With more than 100 pairs of unclaimed shoes in the workshop at the back, it is clear that a lot of the footwear has been in the shop a great deal longer than that. Suleyman is a self-confessed hoarder who never throws anything away, who has four sewing machines in the shop and another four ‘spare’. ‘People say: ‘ooh, you have a lot of stock, look at all this stock’, but stock is money and if you have cash you spend it.’

Also on offer are knife sharpening, key cutting and sewing machine repairs. ‘I do everything. You have to. The market here was good; things were much better then and there were a lot more people’. Today the ‘Repairs’ sign outside the shop is falling apart and missing an ‘R’ and the distinctly faded window display complete with debris and dead plants appears to have remained unchanged since the shop opened. Yet Suleyman, smiling, remains optimistic, saying: ‘When a tiger is hungry, what does he do? He looks for food. And that is how customers find me.’ With rates at £1,400 a month and recently introduced parking restrictions, he admits to struggling, but says for him his work is his hobby and offers to design and make to measure a pair of boots for me for £200.

Getting up at 4am, he opens the shop daily from 7am to 4pm ‘because I want to talk to people’. 'Everyone in Chatsworth Road calls me Dad', says Suleyman, who still walks the length of the high street several times a week. ‘I am very happy. I spend my life here.’

Shutting Up Shop

The dentist on the corner of Dunlace and Chatsworth Road, which reportedly had blood on the ceiling and always felt more like a dodgy cab office than anywhere you would go for your health, closed around three years ago and is still empty. The disused mobile phone shop next door is now used as a prayer room. Next door to that, Halah Meat and Groceries has been closed for at least two years. A row of three disused shops (numbers 33, 35 and 37 Chatsworth Road) is a sad statistic and hopefully one that is not the shape of things to come on the street. Happily, one door down, at number 39, The Regent is a hive of activity six days a week.

The Bike Shop

Sol has been running the bike shop since 1990, before that he owned a fishing tackle and sports shop at number 62.

Jai Dee's

This 'Seafood and Caribbean Cuisine Restaurant' does a brisk trade in everything from curry goat, fried lobster tails and salt fish to peanut porridge, rum fruit cake and macaroni cheese.

The Off Licence

The men who run the off licence are the proud owners of a two and a half year old rottweiler called Cesur.

'The Shop'

The owner of 'The Shop' at number 40, Chatsworth Road (whose opening hours are clearly displayed in the window: Monday–Sunday: closed) enjoys living on 'this peculiar and wonderful street'.

" I bought ‘The Shop’ in 1999 where St Lucian twins were dealing in ‘import and export’. In many ways things are even more interesting now. I love the fact that a different ethnic minority occupies each shop. This block and the one opposite were built specifically as part of a new neighbourhood in the 1870s; the road was put in afterwards. Percy Ingles on the corner is the only chain on this street – that is, apart from the three bookmakers. It opened in 1991 when the market was still thriving, in what had been a bakery 150 years before."

Herbert, 87 years old

Herbert was born just off Chatsworth Road, where he still lives.

"When you woke up in the morning you could hear the birds singing. It was a different world then. There would be bands playing on the marshes, kites in the sky and real street parties with acrobats. It might sound like heaven – it was – but we didn’t know it then. There were seven butchers – I used to get faggots, salt beef and saveloys. We did all our shopping on Chatsworth Road and had all our entertainment there too. There was no need to go anywhere else. Where the snooker hall is now was the cinema and we all used to go to the pictures a lot. Cohen’s grocery store was there, the first Tesco. There were two pie and mash shops – one was where the Chinese is now; we had a lot of dinners in there. The old post office was an electrical shop and the dentist by the school was a television shop. There were two ironmongers that sold everything, as well as a tailors, a drapers and several fish shops. The Blackhorse pub was wonderful and always busy. The market stalls used to go right down as far as Chats Palace and opposite was the Corner Pin pub where everyone went. At the market they used to make sweets – they smelt lovely."