Pootling along on a vintage Yamaha moped at 2:30pm on a Sunday afternoon, three hours after they were scheduled to open, Harry Sims rolls up to their vintage football kit shop Hartex in the forsaken Gabriel’s Wharf. “Sorry, this scooter is about to talk very loudly in Chinese,” they warn as they turn off the engine. The scooter does indeed proceed to speak loudly in Chinese. “I got it from a Jamaican man in Peckham,” they say, grinning ear to ear, as though that explains everything. Railings of obscure football shirts are brought outside unit 9 of Gabriel’s Wharf. Underneath a pink England flag bearing the slogan “peace, love, pie and mash”, Hartex’s handwritten sign bears a solemn reminder of the shop and Gabriel’s Wharf's future: “10 days before demolition”.
In April 2025, the current tenants of Gabriel’s Wharf were informed that 2026 would be their last year of trading, as the whole area was to be closed for re-development. Since then, the relationship between the tenants and their landlords, Coin Street Community Builders (CSCB), has fallen apart.
Sims, 29 from Ilford, describes themselves as a “non-binary, autistic, adhd geezer”. As is fitting for the owner of a vintage clothing store, their style is eclectic. On this particular day they’re wearing a Hawaiian style NY Yankees cap with a Hartex branded Wallace & Gromit t-shirt, complete with rainbow-coloured Umbro shorts and luminous Nike running trainers. Hartex has existed in some capacity since 2019. Originally Sims’s Depop username (before they were banned from the app for life for “unknown” reasons), Hartex came to life after they dropped out of UAL and opened the location in Gabriel’s Wharf during the pandemic.
On the day I visit, the earliest customers have to wait outside so Sims can prepare the shop. “Sometimes I wish I could just tell customers to fuck off to be honest,” after they leave without a purchase. “Almost every day someone comes in before I’m ready. Running a shop by yourself is like doing the job of ten different people at once.”
Customers continue to stream in. It is comfortably the most popular clothing shop on the Wharf, a testament to the endless popularity of football shirts, as well as Hartex’s eye-catching storefront. Yet the brutal reality is that by the end of September, there will be no more customers for any of the 20 or so Gabriel’s Wharf shops. At the time of publication, Hartex will be open for its final weekend.
Sims and their fellow independent business owners claim communication from CSCB has been poor and that the owners don’t even have a plan for the space. As tensions escalate in the run-up to closing day, there have been whispers of deliberate neglect and even an accusation that Coin Street spitefully felled trees in the area to make it look worse.
It’s a story that’s familiar all over London: tenants and locals clash all the time with owners and developers over how land should be used. What makes the tension unusual in this case, though, is that the landlord itself began as a residents’ group pushing back against development plans.
So how did an anti-development group become a pro-development landlord facing opposition from its own residents? I’ve spent the final days of Gabriel’s Wharf visiting the site and speaking to the people involved to try and understand how we got here.
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