TfL says Old Street station is now ‘safer, more accessible and welcoming’. So why are there still no shops?

When Ben Page-Phillips and his brother Tom got the keys to their shop in Old Street station in 1999, it was not in the best nick. It had been “a bit unloved” for years, he says. There was no power, it was dark and the ceiling was covered in office-style polystyrene tiles. It was only later that they started removing those tiles and discovered what they were hiding. “We realised there was this fantastic triple height ceiling.”

Helped out by a builder friend, the brothers set about transforming the space into a light and bright café to accommodate their vision of what the area needed: soups. “At the time, that whole area was a food desert. I mean, there was the Wetherspoon’s, there was the McDonald’s and there was one half-decent pub.”

Inspired by the hot new concept of soup bars coming out of New York, they wanted to offer a healthy lunch option to nearby office-workers. Nincomsoup was born. Over the years, the commuter ranks swelled as Old Street became the centre of the so-called East London Tech City. It was the era of ‘Silicon Roundabout’ and everyone was an entrepreneur. 

“Almost every two weeks, there’d be new people that you met, new businesses, new startups. And we ourselves, we would be a testing ground for so many new companies.” Nincomsoup would let up-and-coming brands borrow its kitchen, or trial a new product for sale in its fridges. It even had one of the first Bitcoin ATMs in London.

But everything came to a stop in 2021 when Nincomsoup, like its neighbours in the underground shopping centre attached to Old Street station, was forced to move out by the major renovation of the area.

By 2024, the refurbishment finally concluded after several delays and an increase in the cost to £132m – over three times the initial budget. But in the two years since, the freshly redone retail units in the same underpass where Nincomsoup once lived have yet to be filled. Each day, commuters and locals walk past the shuttered shops with ‘to let’ signs boasting that 16 million journeys are made through the station each year.

With a new entrance and safer roads, the revamp was supposed to transform Old Street. But inside the station, its main legacy has so far been a collection of empty units. What went wrong?