Merry Croydon Christmas: the Westfield-run Whitgift Centre this week, less than 14 shopping days to Christmas, with more buckets than customers. Mayor Perry is ‘working with’ Westfield, while blocking off customer access to the centre
Businesses struggling for survival in the long-neglected Whitgift Centre say they are enduring their worst Christmas trading season in 25 years
The closure of the Wellesley Road pedestrian subway has entered a second week, with potential customers blocked off from accessing shops in the Whitgift Centre just before Christmas, and traders kept in the dark about when this important access point and emergency exit might re-open, if at all.
There is speculation that the council wants to close the underpass permanently, which would make it even more difficult for potential customers to reach the few shops and businesses that remain in the long-neglected shopping centre.
“Zero communication about it to us or our neighbours of course as premises directly affected,” according to one trader who contacted Inside Croydon, who said that the underpass was their main fire exit route for mobility-impaired visitors.
Croydon town centre’s network of pedestrian underpasses, a legacy of the 1960s development of a shopping mall, a six-lane urban motorway and the Croydon Flyover, have presented town planners and the police with growing dilemmas in recent years, as they have turned into crime hot-spots and have been used by the street homeless for refuge.
No way through: the barriers to the pedestrian subway went up at the end of last week
The council has already blocked off pedestrian subways near East Croydon Station, as Town Hall sources suggest that Mayor Jason Perry has determined to remove the underpasses as a night-time option for the homeless.
The subway under Altyre Road was blocked in the summer because it “attracted repeated antisocial behaviour”, the council said, adding that it became a “disused and unsafe site”, and referred to “an unauthorised encampment” which led to “further antisocial behaviour”.
The Wellesley Road subway appears to be heading for a similar fate, with some suggestion that there had been a fire there, too, recently.
“Office workers who bought from us on the way home or on their lunch break now no longer have any reason or route to go through, it’s brought our small footfall down to nothing,” one of the Whitgift Centre traders said as the closure has blocked them off from their customers.
“The only people we get in coming past now is people who don’t realise that it’s closed yet.”
Another said: “We were assured just last month that the underpass wasn’t going to be closed. And yet here we are just before Christmas, with nobody going past at all.
“We’ve been here 25 years and this is one of the worst seasons we’ve had.”
Other businesses based in the Whitgift Centre say that they are not opposed to a closure of the subway: “We just expected that there might be at least a conversation about it first, some notice, and a safe crossing installed at ground level on Wellesley Road first.”
To make a bad situation worse, another of the entrances to the Whitgift Centre, by the bus stop, remains closed months after it was boarded up following a car crashing into it.
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