Redevelopment.

Well, here is what I believe to be a scoop. I have been sent written confirmation from Lidl that they are now going ahead with creating a new discount supermarket on the old Atlas Chemicals factory site in Fraser Road, Erith. A spokesperson for Lidl wrote:-"Thank you for taking the time to email us about our plans in Erith. At the moment we don’t have timescales that we can confirm to you as we have only just this week obtained vacant possession of the site from the tenant occupiers. We will now carry out further surveys etc. before putting together a programme for works. Hopefully it wont be long until we can open the doors to a new Lidl store in Erith". Lidl propose the demolition of the Atlas Trade Park in Fraser Road, and construction of a stand alone Lidl food store with associated car parking. Provision of a brand new discount food store (1,375 m2 sales area, 806 m2 of ancillary space) with 91 free car parking bays of which 2 would be for electric vehicles, 6 would be disabled spaces and 8 parent and child spaces.  Lidl were refused planning permission for the new store originally in 2019 by Bexley Council. I, along with several other local people have noted that over the last couple of weeks, building surveyors and geological survey operatives have been on the site, conducting the drilling of survey bore holes in several areas of the extensive location. Personally I cannot understand why Bexley Council declined the original planning permission; Erith is dominated by Morrison's supermarket - there is no realistic competition - I don't feel that Farm Foods or Iceland offer anything like the full range of goods that Morrison's does. On top of this, the Erith Quarry housing development - next door to the proposed Lidl site is now open, with over four hundred new houses and apartments. In early 2019, Lidl carried out an independently audited survey of local residents; the results were overwhelmingly positive. A total of 1,366 people responded to the survey, of which 1,276 local residents supported the construction of a new Lidl store on the former Atlas Trading Estate site. Lidl is a German international discount retailer chain that operates over 12,000 stores, present in every member state of the European Union, Serbia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Headquartered in Neckarsulm, Baden-Württemberg. In 1930, Josef Schwarz became a partner in a company based in Heilbronn named Südfrüchte Großhandlung Lidl & Co. which had been established since at least 1858 under the name A.Lidl & Cie specialising in the sale of exotic fruits. Schwarz renamed the company Lidl & Schwarz KG and expanded into a food wholesaler. In 1977, under his son Dieter Schwarz, the Schwarz Group began to focus on discount markets, larger supermarkets, and cash and carry wholesale markets. Dieter did not want to use the name Schwarz-Markt (literally "black market") and wanted to use the name of his father's former business partner, A. Lidl, but legal reasons prevented him from using that name for his discount stores. When he discovered a newspaper article about a painter and retired schoolteacher Ludwig Lidl, he bought the rights to the name from him for 1,000 German marks. The first Lidl discount store was opened in 1973, copying the Aldi concept. Schwarz rigorously removed merchandise that did not sell from the shelves, and cut costs by keeping the size of the retail outlets as small as possible. By 1977, the Lidl chain comprised 33 discount stores. Lidl opened its first UK store in 1994. Its grocery market share in the UK was 5.9% in 2019. Like fellow German supermarket Aldi, Lidl has a zero waste, no-frills, "pass-the-savings-to-the-consumer" approach of displaying most products in their original delivery cartons, allowing the customers to take the product directly from the carton. When the carton is empty, it is simply replaced with a full one. Staffing is low. Compared to Aldi, there are generally more branded products offered. Lidl distributes many low-priced gourmet foods by producing each of them in a single European Union country for its whole worldwide chain, but it also sources many local products from the country where the store is located. Like Aldi, Lidl has special weekly offers, and its stock of non-food items often changes. In contrast to Aldi, Lidl advertises extensively in its homeland of Germany. The Lidl operation in the United Kingdom took a different approach from Germany, with a focus on marketing and public relations, and providing employee benefits not required by law, including paying the independently verified living wage and offering a staff discount.[39] Upmarket products were introduced, especially in the lead-up to Christmas. This required significant investment in marketing to produce sales growth but had an effect on Lidl's logistical operation and pressure on profits. Ronny Gottschlich, who had run Lidl GB for the six years to 2016, was responsible for this approach, which led to friction with head office, due to the cost involved. In September 2016, Gottschlich unexpectedly left and was replaced by the Austrian sales and operations director, German-national Christian Härtnagel. Lidl continued to have ambitious investment plans in the United Kingdom, doubling the number of stores to 1,500. In the financial year 2015, Lidl Great Britain's revenue from its over 630 stores throughout Britain was £4.7 billion. Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Thanks once again for all of the kind thoughts from my readers; unfortunately I am still suffering from Post Covid Fatigue - a condition which currently leaves me feeling shatteringly exhausted. I have never been this ill, or for so long. I have had three consultations with NHS healthcare professionals and there is no cure for the condition - I just have to wait it out until it eventually goes away.

The now long closed Spice Master Indian restaurant in Nuxley Road, Upper Belvedere is now up for sale for a price of £685,000 for the freehold of the land land for redevelopment. Back in September of 2020, plans were submitted to convert the Spice Master restaurant into a block of flats, with the restaurant continuing to exist on the ground floor, but with a side extension and an additional two floors added to the building. You can see an artists impression as the lower of the three images above - click on any of them for a larger view. The middle image shows the restaurant in its heyday, with its uniformed and very impressive doorman. It would now appear that the site is up for sale for complete demolition and for yet more flats to be built. The upper photograph shows what the building used to look like in its original form, back in the 1970's. The Coffee Tavern used to be a prominent building located in Nuxley Road, Upper Belvedere (NOT Nuxley Village - no such place exists - it is a fictional construct dreamed up by out of town estate agents and has no historical relevance whatsoever). The Coffee Tavern was one of the oldest buildings in the area. For the last couple of decades until it closed, it as been the home of The Spice Master Indian Restaurant. The building that the restaurant is located in has a lot of history. It was originally constructed as a Victorian temperance cafe called the Belvedere Coffee Tavern and Refreshment Bar. I can dimly recall it as a “greasy spoon” type cafe when I was a child, growing up in Upper Belvedere. I never went in it, but would go past regularly. In the mid to late eighties the cafe building was extensively extended and remodelled, to the extent that the owners got into some rather hot water with Bexley Council planning department, as the original structure was a grade II listed building, and they altered it so much that it lost its listing. At the same time it was extended, it changed from being a rather scruffy looking cafe into a rather upmarket Italian restaurant called La Dolce Vita, which seemed to be mainly  frequented by elderly Jaguar driving wide boys and their brassy wives. It was very popular at lunch times for people holding business meetings, and at weekends it was packed – especially for Sunday lunch when one would need to book in advance to stand a chance of getting a table. During the middle of this period, it was exposed by the News Shopper has having the worst kitchen hygiene recorded in Bexley to that date; the place was so bad that it was featured on at least one television consumer protection programme. This had the effect of killing trade off almost overnight. They cleaned the place up, and re-launched it the next year with a new name –“The Garden”, but people had long memories, and the trade did not return. One diner of the time told me ”It was nearly always empty and almost overly friendly with the service. We knew of its health and safety problems (but that was like a year before we'd started going there so it had cleaned up its act) and we had some lovely meals. We tended to use it as a "sod-it-we-can't-be-arsed-to-cook" night as it was local, quite reasonable and they had a tolerable / well priced wine list. It was nice enough but I'm not a fan of Italian Restaurants seeing as at home we eat a lot of Italian style dishes (pasta, lasagne, meatballs, Mediterranean salad etc) so I like to have stuff a bit different when I go out.  It was the height of mid-80's home decoration inside, if I remember rightly. Artex about 3ft thick and everything covered in fake Roman columns, plastic ivy and plaster statues with B and Q's finest wall-hangings and light fittings. Probably quite swish in the day but when we were there in the mid-90's it was a little tired and dated and not my type of thing at all”. Not long after this, it closed for good and lay empty and boarded up for quite a time. It was about at this time that I moved to Erith, and was less aware of the goings on in Nuxley Road than I used to be. The old restaurant building was again gutted and refurbished, this time as an Indian restaurant The Spice Master; the first competition for the venerable and long established Belvedere Tandoori, which was one of my introductions to high street curry eating back in the day. I did not try the new restaurant, now called The Spice Master for many years; I was working in the East End, and used to visit the legendary, and sadly now long closed Sweet and Spicy a couple of times a week; I would also make regular lunch time trips to the Halal Restaurant in Mark Street E1 – which has been serving up genuine Bangladeshi food since shortly before WWII, and is one of the oldest continually in service curry houses in the UK. In many ways at this time I was spoiled for choice, and “ate what the locals ate”. Consequently I did become quite sniffy about ordinary high street curry houses and the food that they cooked. I felt that it was not “authentic” and was too engineered to suit a Western palate. In essence I had become a bit of a curry snob.  During this time, The Spice Master just curried on (oh the wit!) and our paths did not cross. Once I had moved on from the job based in the East End, the curry consumption drastically reduced, but I still had a degree of disdain for ordinary high street restaurants. Over the last few years I have come to realise that your high street curry is a thing on its own. It may not bear much resemblance to food you would eat in Bangalore or Karachi, but it has now been around for long enough to have created its own unique identity – it is what it is, and it is rightfully unapologetic. Most high street curry, whilst being called “Indian” is actually far closer to Bangladeshi cuisine, as most of the original restaurant owners came from Bangladesh, rather than India, but were quick to realise that in 1950’s / 1960’s Britain, most English people had not heard of Bangladesh, so a bit of inspired re - branding labelled the new food outlets as “Indian” restaurants. Back in May of 2017, the Spice Master was subject to some extreme vandalism; a group of six or seven youths tried to enter the restaurant; as it was close to closing time and the group were rowdy and very drunk, the owner refused to admit them. After some altercation the group eventually agreed to leave, but asked the owner to call them a cab. As the group were abusive, and in any case had not been customers, the owner declined. The group eventually left. I have been informed from several sources that the yobs turned up at around 2 AM, long after the restaurant had closed, and proceeded to break all of the windows. As far as I have been able to ascertain, no prosecutions resulted from this criminal act. The former restaurant is now in danger  of demolition and redevelopment as flats.

The end video this week is from the 2025 Erith Model Railway Society Exhibition. Comments and feedback as always to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.