John Shepherd, Partridges: “The 15 minute deli”

I have recently been reading about the concept of the 15 Minute City. It concerns the design aim of modern city planning in order to support local communities where most, if not all, basic needs can be supplied within a walk of about 15 minutes.

It is by no means a new idea and harks back to the evolution of the local parish. Apparently, the idea of a parish originally emerged as an area close enough to a church to hear the bells tolling and walk to prayer in about 10-15 minutes. From parishes grew villages and from villages grew larger communities. So for Londoners in the 18th century, most of the necessities of life such as the church, the market, the water fountain, the theatre or the school could be found within a 10 15 minute walk which equates to a radius of 100 acres.

In Paris, where they take the quality of life very seriously with defined quartiers and arrondissements, they calculate that all the needs of the local citizens should be accommodated within one kilometre. Sadly, there seem to be few neighbourhoods of modern London I can think of that do not provide such a rich fabric of amenities within a short walk.

The internal combustion engine and modern planning have played their part in redrawing the map of local communities. In some ways our shop has undergone a similar evolution over time, especially difficult times, by trying to expand the offering and reach out to a wider range of customers.

It is true to say that we have a large shop and that sometimes we are not sure what to do with different parts of it. But nevertheless, over the years we have evolved into something quite different to what we started out as.

In the 1970s, our opening company motto was ‘Providing good things for the larder’ which sounded very much like an episode of Upstairs Downstairs. (A popular television programme based on a family living round the corner, albeit 80 years before our arrival).

At the time we were perceived to be rather expensive, somewhat traditional and perhaps out of step with the direction of austerity Britain where everything was going
self-service. However, by extending our opening hours and introducing a larger delicatessen counter with a cake counter and offering late night opening and deliveries we started to broaden the appeal to more customers.

When we moved to our newer and larger location in 2004 I even contemplated opening a post office in one-third of the shop in order to draw in footfall! That idea fortunately withered on the vine. However, we did introduce a coffee shop, newspapers, cigarettes and cigars (please don’t tell anyone), household products and various
well-known brands that I hesitate to mention. Most controversially – to ourselves at least – we opened a fine food market on our very own doorstep.

This was essentially to draw customers to the new location of the shop and counterintuitively has actually worked very well for us. In recent times we have introduced an ATM machine prompted by local bank closures, started selling cookware, introduced local start-up artisans, worked with a delivery platform and extended the range of own label products.

There are other items in the pipeline as well, but it is always important to remember where the bread is buttered and not neglect the core business of promoting high-quality products. However, the range of services a speciality food shop can provide in 15 minutes may be a lot more than ‘good things for the larder’, especially in austerity Britain.