This Saturday will be your last chance to enjoy a decent cup of coffee, maybe a sandwich or a bit of cake, in what claims to be the best café in the Whitgift Centre.
Shutting up shop: the Camden Coffee House closes on March 2
The Camden Coffee House has announced it will cease trading in the Whitgift Centre on March 2.
The café, part of a small chain, has operated in Croydon’s biggest shopping centre for 10 years. The management confirmed the closure, blaming deteriorating trading conditions in the centre.
The café’s three staff are all to be redeployed at other branches.
“The whole Whitgift management is driving me, and many others, to despair,” according to one trader in the increasingly empty shopping mall, now under the management of Westfield.
The closure of Camden Coffee House is “another nail in the coffin for the Whitgift”, a source said. Many are questioning whether the Whitgift Centre can recover from the closure at the end of last year of Sainsbury’s, one of the centre’s original tenants and the mall’s only dedicated groceries supermarket.
According to someone closely associated with the café, “This place was an oasis of calm for a lot of people, and was probably the best coffee shop in Croydon. How long until the whole centre closes down?”
Sources close to the business say that there has been a sharp decline in visitors to the Whitgift Centre, while they have suffered with faulty and non-operating escalators and long-standing repair works using scaffolding around the centre, which has been off-putting for customers.
“If it wasn’t for out long-standing, loyal customers, we might have closed down a long time ago,” said a source.
Camden Coffee is the latest of a series of exits of traders from the shopping centre, which was earmarked for redevelopment by Westfield and the land-owners, the Whitgift Foundation, 12 years ago.
Last week, Croydon’s Mayor, Jason Perry, was acting as a cheerleader for Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, parroting their propaganda about “12 new signings” for stores across the Whitgift and Centrale shopping malls, claiming “demand from occupiers is at an ‘all-time high'”… except one of the dozen was a relocation of an existing tenant, and at least two were “pop-ups” of social enterprises which pay little, if any rent.
“Exciting times ahead for Croydon,” regurgitated Perry, like some craven ventriloquist dummy with Westfield’s hand stuck up his arse.
Those trying to make a living from running a business in the Whitgift Centre see things very differently from the discredited Mayor.
“I love Croydon, but where is the much-promised strategy for the Whitgift Centre?
“Or is it simply death by a thousand closures?
“All the businesses that brought character to the centre are being wiped out. Soon there’ll be no point in visiting the centre at all. Who is responsible for deciding the future of this place? Where is it going? By 2025 there’ll be tumbleweed drifting by the empty units of the Whitgift…”.
Jason Perry’s term as Mayor of Croydon ends in May 2026
Read more: Westfield boss says Croydon scheme could take 15 more years
Read more: Whitgift Centre ever-present Sainsbury’s opts to shut up shop
Read more: What will the ‘new’ Westfield deal really mean for Croydon?
Read more: Centrale’s owners set to sell-up to Westfield in cut-price deal
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
I noticed the repairs to the roof seem to involve putting up netting. Presumably to catch the glass ceiling when it collapses?
Might just as well cut out the word cafe and be accurate for now and the future!
Can anyone in the trade explain this?
Is footfall really that low? The latest Centrale and Whitgift leasing brochure claims there are 12 million visits a year, which is at odds with Completely Retail’s take that there are in fact 15 million.
Are leases and rents being put out of reach of struggling tenants?
Is the value of these small businesses of no consequence to the Whitgift’s global owners?
Are the closures part of a managed /orchestrated decline, making it easier to demolish and start again?
It would be good to know
12 million visits means an average of more than 32,000 per day. Given how sad and deserted the place feels, I find that hard to believe.
Holding out any hope for the survival of the Whitgift centre is about as futile as hoping for the eventual resuscitation of the extinct Norwegian Blue Parrot or the discovery of the merest scintilla of charisma in any of our national or local politicans.
Harsh.
But fair.
That’s me in a nutshell!
I am one that liked the camden coffee house on the first floor. Staff were friendly and efficient and coffee not bad (not the best but up there definitely) and it was cosy inside. I will miss it definitely. But there is little within the Centre now and with the problems and shoplifting I saw every day I just do not go much anymore.
I am glad that the staff are still going to be employed as they would be a credit to any business.
(Arfur reports the blurb states 12m people visiting? Thats 32k+ a day. 10% of the population and visitors? Who are they counting in those figures? Seriously the place is deserted in comparison to – well anywhere. There are more people in the shops on the london Road than in Centrale and Whitgift combined.)
Have the landlords considered letting Camden Coffee stay in Whitgift for a peppercorn rent, say £5 per month? Surely any rent is better than no rent. Other empty properties should also be offered for small rent. I can perfectly well understand how a coffee shop cannot acquire customers when there are so few shops for people to visit.
“Surely any rent is better than no rent.”
This is how normal people think, but not any landlords.
Surely the problem is the name? The coffee shop is in Croydon, not Camden. And Camden is hardly the centre of the London coffee scene?
How do you explain Cafe Nero then?
Well that’s a puzzle! You are confusing people and places: Camden is a district in North London … Nero was a Roman emperor who died 2000 years ago. Don’t think he ever tasted coffee but he allegedly burnt the city.
I would like to thank the staff at Camden Coffee who have given such cheerful service over all these years. It certainly was an oasis and somewhere I could take friends or go alone. As we are getting used to businesses suddenly not being there, we have to look elsewhere including other towns.