Myddleton Road, Bowes Park, has won the London section of the 2016 Great British High Street of the Year awards.
This winner is an example of the power of local people and business areas working together to support their area. The community has rallied around their local high street- putting on a range of events, working with local partners such as the school and have created a really strong online presence through Twitter and local online forums and using their We Love Myddleton Road brand.
If you've been visiting Myddleton Road on and off over the past two or three years, then you'll know how well deserved this award is. A once typical Edwardian shopping street had gradually become run down and scruffy to the point that it had become a sort of "ghost street". But a determined effort by local residents has turned around the street's fortunes and attracted new businesses to take over and renovate the attractive shops.
Interestingly, we're not seeing gentrification Hackney- or Shoreditch-style - where supposedly fresh and innovative shops and cafes actually turn out to be just slight variations on a standardized theme. Behind each of the newly restored shopfronts we find genuinely one-off businesses offering a whole range of affordable foods, goods and services and also reflecting the cosmopolitan nature of our part of north London, with its large populations of people from Cyprus, Italy and, these days of course, Poland.
Naturally, there is a micro-brewery, round the corner in Whittington Road. But instead of citrussy American-style single hop varietal IPAs, Black Pale Ales and the like, Bohem produces beers in the styles found in the home country of its two Czech brewers (and, it has to be pointed out, rather more flavoursome than much of the beer sold in Prague these days).
As well as beer, there is locally distilled gin, produced to a supposedly illegal recipe by Old Bakery Gin. They are on the Enfield side of the border, in Pymmes Mews, near the railway bridge across the North Circular, so actually in Palmers Green.
