• YOU published a letter of mine in September 2018 urging the council to think imaginatively about how to use empty private property to benefit social purposes.

Since then the situation in Kentish Town Road has worsened. Many more small businesses have been pushed out of the market by increasing rates and rents under the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

What is the council doing to sustain independent entrepreneurs in the neighbourhood?

Only last week this paper noted that “Council planners must decide whether to allow [the bookmaker Betfred] to expand its shop in the high road into the vacant unit next door” (Big bet on empty shop, August 11).

The council has an alternative to backing a multi-billion-pound betting business. A new pop-up shop called Hub and Culture has opened in part of the premises of the former Pane Vino in Kentish Town Road.

It is a collective enterprise incorporating eight independent small businesses of people who currently share the rent equally.

The shop is an amazingly colourful and friendly place, selling jewellery, crystals and minerals for wellbeing and health, gowns and T-shirts, plant pots, and small-scale furniture made from recycled materials in West Africa and India.

All the items are handmade, both by the entrepreneurs themselves and by local artisans in their place of origin.

Hub and Culture has attracted large numbers of customers, surpassing the expectations of the shop’s inspirational co-ordinator, Akua Ofosuhene. Ms Ofosuhene is a dressmaker and jeweller, and has been in the wellbeing business for decades.

The current licence on Hub and Culture expires in September, so Ms Ofosuhene is keen to persuade the council to extend it, to enable her and her group to establish themselves as part of the local community.

It already has the feel of being part of the community so why not enable it to flourish?
Surely it would be a feather in the council’s cap to be able to develop flexible policies on rent and rates paid by both private landlords and their tenants to enable a collective enterprise such as this to grow rather than support an expansion of Betfred?

HARRIET EVANS, NW5