You might mistake it for a celebration: champagne, bunting, heart-shaped balloons. The front of Brixton News, the kiosk inside the neighbourhood’s tube station selling papers, magazines and snacks, is covered in streamers, twinkling under the false daylight of the strip-lights. In fact, it is a funeral. Today, after 36 years on the job, Brixton News co-owner Pritesh Patel will finish his shift, pull down the shutters and close the shop forever.
“This last week, today, I've hugged more people than I've heard in 36 years,” Pritesh tells me. “The amount of people I've taken pictures with…” he trails off, smiling. “I've interacted with nearly everyone in the area at some point: sometimes I've done them a favour, and we've chatted, we’ve talked. It's just having somewhere you can come and have a conversation. Something local.”
As we reported on Monday, TfL are raising the rent on the unit Pritesh and his brother run from £40,000 a year to £125,000 a year (for an increased size premises), something that the business simply cannot afford. And so, one of the last proper newsagent’s in the city is closing.
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The outcry was swift and intense: “Absolutely disgraceful and soulless actions,” said one commenter on our Instagram post, while another wrote “greed — should be ashamed.” TfL, for their part, say that they “have the opportunity to increase the size of the retail unit currently occupied by the newsstand, and asked Pritesh in January 2024 if he’d be interested in the larger space. He decided not to stay, and we wish him all the best in his future endeavours and would welcome him elsewhere on our estate.”
When the brothers first acquired the shop in 1990, the lease was £8,000 a year — around £20,000 today — though there was serious money to be made back then. But the rents have increased every three years, Pritesh says, and “at some point, in five to ten years, we would have got to a point where we’d have to say, ‘we’ve got to walk away’, because the rents would’ve just kept increasing.” Their margins, he explains, are slight, with papers at 18% and magazines at 25%. Most of the money is made on sweets and drinks. “You can't pay stupid rent when you’re taking that.”
Pritesh, a handsome 60 year old in wire-rimmed glasses and fingerless gloves, has the quiet authority and approachable charm of somebody who has spoken to every conceivable type of person, day-in, day-out for years. “I’m a talker,” he says, “even with my friends, my family.” His diction is crisp and clear, all the better to make himself heard over the hustle and bustle of the underground station; the beep of contactless, the smack of the barriers, the dub thrumming in the street above. He seems meditative about what’s happening, or at least resigned, and isn’t angry at the move; though today, he tells a customer, he feels emotional. “I can tell,” she says, “you’re usually very stoic.”
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