Bring back the corner shop
Zoning rules banned the shop at the end of the street. It is time to let milk, bread and gossip back into our neighbourhoods.
ID
Ines Dubois
Home and city
Filed under
City
Streets, shops, bikes and paint. Small changes that make a neighbourhood feel like one.
The short version
1
Zoning rules quietly banned the shop at the end of the street.
2
Corner shops sell milk and give people a reason to say hello.
3
Some cities are letting small shops back in.
The house I rent was a shop once. You can still see it if you know where to look: a wider front window, a step at the door worn into a dip by a hundred years of feet, a painted sign under the plaster that shows through when it rains. For most of the twentieth century, this corner sold bread, milk, cigarettes and news.
In many cities it would now be illegal to open that shop again. Zoning rules written in the middle of the last century separated homes from commerce, on the theory that people should live in quiet streets and drive to shops elsewhere. We are still living with the result.
What we lost
The corner shop was never really about the milk. It was a place where the neighbourhood met without planning to. The owner knew who was sick, who had a new baby, who had not been seen for a few days. Children were sent there alone on their first errand. Old people went every morning for a paper they could have had delivered, because the walk and the chat were the point.
A corner shop sells milk. What it really provides is a reason to walk to the end of the road.
The case for bringing it back
A few cities have started to reverse the rules, allowing small shops, cafés and workshops on residential corners again. The early results are encouraging. People walk more. Car trips for small errands drop. And the shops, being small and local, tend to be run by people who live nearby.
Allow small shops on corner plots in residential areas, with sensible limits on size and hours.
Waive parking requirements for them. Their customers walk.
Let existing former shops convert back without a full planning application.
A corner is enough
Nobody is asking for a supermarket at the end of every street. The request is much smaller: a corner, a counter, a person who knows your name. That is a tiny change to a planning code. It would be a large change to how a neighbourhood feels.
My landlord says he would open the shop again tomorrow if he were allowed. He already has a name for it. I will not print it here, because I would like him to have the chance to use it.
From the camera roll
Open on the coldest day
Bread, milk, news
The window does the advertising
“A corner shop sells milk. What it really provides is a reason to walk to the end of the road.”
— Ines Dubois
Reader mail
Letters about this post.
“We got one back last year. Everyone knows my name now.”
“I’d trade my car for a corner shop.”
“Ours sells milk, stamps and gossip. In that order.”
ID
Written by
Ines Dubois
Ines has moved house twelve times and kept one plant alive through all of them. She writes about renting, corners and the shops that used to be on them.
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