The pernicious effects of the ‘development blight’ inflicted on Croydon’s town centre by Westfield continue to be keenly felt. JOHNNY DOBBYN paid possibly his last visit to the wine bar which will be pulling down the shutters for a final time next week
Nick nacks: almost everything to be found inside Bishop’s Wine Bar is up for sale
Next Tuesday, the glasses will be collected for the last time at Bishop’s Wine Bar in the Whitgift Centre. After 44 years, one of Croydon’s most enduring establishments will close its doors, not because customers stopped coming, nor because its owners wished to retire.
But because Westfield has thrown them out.
On any weekday lunchtime in the late 1980s, if you couldn’t find a colleague from the Home Office, the Property Services Agency, the council or one of the many busy offices that were once to be found in the town centre, there was a good chance they were in Bishop’s.
Named after its location in Bishop’s Court, Bishop’s was the daily haunt of office workers taking their lunchtime break while the pissed-at-your-desk culture was still strong.
But lunchtime drinking is a thing of the past, and the drinkers – and, more importantly, the big businesses that once employed them – are long gone.
Bishop’s itself will close next week because the current owners, Angela Ferrara and her father, Tony, received what Angela describes as a “stark letter” from their landlord on New Year’s Eve last year invoking a break clause requiring the bar to close within six months.
According to Angela, and despite repeated requests, no reason for the eviction has ever been given.
Bolt hole: Bishop’s Wine Bar will be the latest Whitgift Centre business to close, next Tuesday, July 1
It’s not as if Westfield, in the current guise of Paris-based URW, needs Bishop’s premises in a massive rush: their latest planning application for the town centre regeneration, which was supposed to be submitted in 2024, has still not materialised. Once that application is approved, it could be another two years before any works begin.
But no: on December 31 2025, Bishop’s were given their marching orders.
Bishop’s is a Marmite bar of a place. For its fans, its closure will feel like more than the loss of a business. It is the disappearance of one of the last pieces of the Croydon that flourished before Westfield showed its property knickers to the Whitgift Foundation in 2012 and the long-delayed redevelopment left investment in limbo.
Bishop’s closure announcement prompted a petition attracting more than 1,000 signatures and messages of affection from customers who regarded the bar as part of Croydon’s identity rather than simply another licensed premises.
Drum roll: Bishop’s resident cat is oblivious to the venue’s fate
Bishop’s opened in 1982 under Ken Holland who, with his bar colleague Pat, established a traditional wine bar in what was then one of Britain’s busiest shopping centres. The Whitgift Centre had opened 14 years earlier, in October 1968, and the town was booming. Allders dominated the retail landscape, the surrounding office blocks were full and thousands of people worked in the town every day.
Before becoming Bishop’s, the premises had housed the Croydon Information Centre, a tourist office not much needed today. Evidence of its former life remains. The bar itself, wrought-iron embellishments notwithstanding, once served as the centre’s reception counter.
It is a quaint reminder of the building’s original purpose, but an enduring nuisance for Angela and Tony because all its shelves and cubby holes were designed to hold A4 documents, not wine glasses or bottles.
Angela and Tony took over 18 years ago following Ken’s retirement, and faced stiff competition for the premises, including from one woman who, one old regular told me, bore a striking resemblance to the supreme commander of the Nazis’ air force, Hermann Göring.
Angela was already a familiar face, having spent years drinking in Bishop’s during lunch breaks while working at Lunar House. Her mother had been a regular before her.
Yet even then, Bishop’s long-term future looked doubtful.
Calling time: Bishop’s was once a tourist advice centre. From next week, it will be empty
The leaseholder Howard Holdings’ plans to redevelop the centre were due to begin in 2009 and, when the Ferraras moved in, they were warned “not to get too comfortable”. Howard Holdings collapsed in 2010, ushering in the centre’s purgatorial decline after Hammerson and Westfield rocked up in 2011. The development remains stalled even after Westfield took complete control in 2023.
These years of uncertainty and an apparent reluctance to invest in a potentially – now ultimately – doomed venture have taken their toll upon the indisputably tired place.
Depending on your perspective, Bishop’s has been described by supporters as “a warm and cosy little place with a long history and a unique character”, “a huge part of Croydon culture” and “iconic”. To others, its seems like a bit of a dive bar, with a tendency to smell of cats.
For all the affection shown by its customers, many people in Croydon will be barely aware of its existence, let alone mourn its passing. Finding Bishop’s often felt like being admitted to a secret, its location being at best discreet and at worst impossible to find.
Unsympathetic and unhelpful landlords gave no help when the Ferraras asked for some kind of signage in the shopping centre to help potential customers find their way to their little oasis. The Ferraras are not alone in being somewhat isolated in the once-thriving shopping mall: it is equally difficult to find MP Sarah Jones’s constituency office in the Whitgift Centre, too.
Bishop’s is set at the foot of the old Allders car park, whose closure has made access even more problematic, and adjacent to the centre’s central “point block” and the Wellesley Road office towers once occupied by government departments.
Visit it now, while you still can, and it is much as it has always been: either a scruffy jumble sale or an eclectic bazaar of haphazard interior design, idiosyncratic ornaments and football memorabilia. The difference today is that all those fixtures and fittings are actually for sale, offering anyone who wants a souvenir from one of the last and longest-standing surviving witnesses to the slow death of the Whitgift Centre.
Like Bishop’s or not, its refusal to capitulate in the face of the centre’s decline, the damage inflicted on hospitality by the pandemic, and a generational shift away from drinking alcohol is a remarkable survival story of obduracy – and not knowing what else to do – in the face of corporate disinterest or, worse, enmity.
For the story of Bishop’s Wine Bar mirrors exactly the decline of the Whitgift Centre itself.
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