Chan, Shilpa and Dip Patel in the Euro Sport

HOW many of the most recent shops to open on Finchley Road will still be here to tell the tale 50 years from now?

None, I expect. But then again, there are not many businesses like Euro Sports. I popped into the longest surviving family-run sport shop in the capital and was immediately taken back to happy days of childhood.

New football boots and a ball. A snooker cue, swimming goggles, tennis rackets and ping pong bats. Niche and essential items, like a studs key, chalk pouch or boot bag, the latest club shirts from around the world. They’d lace up your shoes and measure your feet.

And the staff remember and ask after their customers’ family and old friends, decades later.

But all of this is being put at serious jeopardy by what seems like an arbitrary TfL move – without any consultation or notice – to reverse a decision to allow customers to park outside.

Since the change, in October, trade had plummeted in a devastating reduction for any independent business struggling to survive.

Managing director Dip Patel told me: “The same day they took the parking away, business went down and stayed down. The difference is about 12 per cent. That doesn’t sound a lot, but in terms of our survival, the margins – they’re gone.”

The Euro Sport story begins in 1976 with the Patel family, who had been forced to leave behind their homeland in Uganda. President Idi Amin’s “expulsion” policy in 1972 saw all Asian families ordered to leave in 90 days. Many came to the UK, which accepted a “special responsibility” for them. Amin ordered them to leave, arguing that due to colonial rule too many had come to dominate the nation’s trade.

Dip told me: “We were already here, at schools, but when the expulsion came, we remained and our parents came over. My father’s business in Uganda was a builders’ merchants. When he came here, he started working in a small DIY shop. It was too much for him to handle, he didn’t like it. He had a heart attack. Mum had never worked before in her life, but she started working over here too.

“All through childhood I had been expecting to go into builders’ merchants. That was what I wanted to do. Every holiday I’d work in a builders’ merchants shop. It’s what I liked doing. “But then one day I remember my dad looking in the old Dalton’s Weekly and saying: ‘Look son, there’s a sports shop for sale’. I was not keen really but he said: ‘You play tennis, you play golf, snooker, cricket, rugby, football – you play everything, you play all the sports! Business is business’.

“The shop was called Lucas Sports back then. We thought fine, we’ll go for that. The bank wouldn’t give him a loan as he had no experience in this country, but luckily he had an old friend who was a banker who did, and so we were able to get started.

“At that time, everyone was going on about ‘the Euro’ and being in Europe. There was Euro this, and Euro that. So we went with Euro Sports.”

The shop has many specialist services.

Dip shows me how the shop customises tennis rackets with a machine that “tells me the flex, the weight, the balance and the surface area tension – everything I need to know”. “There is us and Wigmore Sports in town, but even they don’t have a machine like us.”

Dip recalled his first days at the store aged 19, looking out at the Woolworths, Sloane Graphics, Louis cake shop and the Mindels luggage shop. Like many high streets, Finchley Road these days has its fair share of often-empty vape, sweet and mobile phone repair shops.

Where else are you going to buy a hockey stick on Finchley Road

Maybe it’s time to question the powers that be?

Shop units seem to be let out without any real thought for what is needed for the area, or what might help a high street to thrive. I think most people look at the high street and subconsciously or otherwise question in whose interests decisions are being taken. Dip said: “On the change to the parking in October, there was no consultation, no letter – nothing.

“Now it’s commercial vehicles only. Deliveries are OK, but customers cannot stop. And if you can’t stop and pick things up, what are you going to do? “So many people come here and say they used to come here as a child. There are people who came in as a kid who brought their kids. And now it’s the third generation bringing their kids in.

“This is a family business. My sister, all she has known is this shop. We have to keep it going. We need the parking to come back.”

The special tennis racket machine

TfL has said that between February 14 and March 27, 2020 there was a consultation on proposals for Finchley Road but that results of this were superseded by a “24 hour bus lane” scheme.

In a response to an FOI about these changes, TfL said: “This is necessary to encourage the use of sustainable transport modes and to support London in the avoidance of a car-based post COVID-19 recovery. The proposed changes will also create a safer environment for cyclists through the provision of road space protected from general traffic.”