Playwright and actor blast tourist trade for making area ‘unbearable’

PLAYWRIGHT Alan Bennett and award winning actor Simon Callow say a booming tourism trade in Camden Town is making the area an ‘unbearable’ place to live and shop.
Mr Bennett, whose plays and diaries have made him one of the country’s best known writers, told the New Journal that the death of his local book shop is a sign of the slow demise of Camden Town, which has been his home for over 30 years.
Regent Bookshop opened 40 years ago in Parkway, is due to shut this month. He said: “Tourism takes precedence over local shops.” He added that national chains were also ruining his high street.
He said: “The good thing about independently owned shops is the personal service – if you order something, Regents get it quickly. Waterstones take so long and it is so impersonal.”
And Mr Callow, who starred in Four Weddings and a Funeral and who is Charles Dickens’s biographer, said the closure of the specialist theatre book shop Offstage in Chalk Farm Road was another nail in the coffin of independent retailers in the area. He said: “It is a real blow, not only for theatre bookshops – of which there are pathetically few- but to bookshops in general.”
Regent Bookshop owner Peter Bergman said he has been forced to shut because chain stores have made it too hard to be competitive.
He said: “They are evil. Soon every High Street and backwater in Britain will be interchangeable and the flavour of whatever makes an area different will be lost.” He added: “Somebody has to look at the way supermarkets homogenise the area around them. I remember when Camden had literally a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker, I know it sounds like a cliché but it was a community then.
“Supermarkets cream off the saleable items – twee titles like Girl with a Pearl Earring and Captain Correlli’s Mandolin – that in small independents are the books which fund backstock and varied ranges.”
And Brian Schwartz, who has run Offstage for 23 years, said he did not think Camden Town would be able to hang on to its reputation for trend setting and unique shops.
Offstage has supplied scripts to hundred’s of local actors: Star Wars actor Ewan McGregor is a regular – and Basic Instinct star Sharon Stone popped in last month while filming in Highgate.