West End Extra - Letters: Post office

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West End Extra - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published: 27 July 2007

Post office closure final straw in Soho’s decline

• SO the Poland Street post office is to be closed. The Post Office has refused to consider either our needs or a 500-name petition. Soho’s community is dealt another blow and what is to be done about it? Nothing. Again.
I was brought up in this area, when it was vibrant, living entity full of families and family-run shops.
Yes, London changes, but the ruthless destruction of a community is unforgiveable.
I have watched while shop after shop and business after business has been driven out by extoritionate overheads.
The electricians who repaired anything and everything and came to your home to work without a call-out charge; the plumbers who had served long apprenticeships; the carpenters and joiners; the wonderful people at the timber yard who could find any of wood you wanted – all gone.
A community cannot live without service infrastructure, and ours has been eliminated.
We were a multifaith area, living in mutual respect and harmony, and I watched in horror as my Jewish neighbours lost their kosher butcher’s shop and the delicatessens where I, too, would buy the ingredients for the wonderful recipes they have given me.
Not so long ago, Soho had myriad butcher’s shops of all nationalities, with crowns of lamb and other glorious cuts displayed in their immaculate windows. But if you want meat now you have to buy it from a supermarket in a ghastly plastic pack.
And as to what was once a profusion of multinational delicatessens: get a plastic tub of tastelesss whatever from a supermarket again.
Newsagents; ironmongers; haberdashers who supplied the tailors, so many of whom had workshops here – all gone.
What the war and the vice trade never manager to do has been achieved mercilessly by big business – the annihilation of a unique community.
Come to London? By all means. But don’t come to Soho, unless all you want is what you get everywhere else, in any chain of coffee bars, sandwich shops and supermarkets.
Everything that made us gloriously individual is being wiped out, and soon there’ll be no trace of it left.
ALIDA BAXTER
Broadwick Street, W1

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, West End Extra, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@westendextra.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Wednesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld. Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number.
Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

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