16 July 2025

Adieu, Marylebone Waitrose…

Goodbye, for now, to a place that has played a formative role in my life – and this column.

The other day, a friend whose cycle route to work takes her through my old neighbourhood, sent me a photo of the Waitrose in Marylebone High Street. It was boarded up, and a huge sign said, “Your nearest stores are: Nova Scotia and Ulaanbaatar. Scan for more information,” next to a large QR code. Well, they were really Edgware Road and Bloomsbury, but you get my drift.

“One of your childcare centres is closed,” said my friend, and she was right, for whenever the kids came to stay for alternate weekends, this was how we would spend Saturday afternoon, or some of it: shopping for that evening’s dinner, and the Sunday lunch the next day. Naturally, it became a fixed ritual, with its own chants and responses. We would look at the bottles of Still Lemonade, which the children were fond of, and one of us would say, “Is it still lemonade?” and the answer would be, “Yes, it’s still lemonade.” A good day would be when the PizzaExpress pizzas were on offer: it represented a considerable saving when multiplied by four. Twenty-six times a year for ten years: the maths isn’t hard. We once saw Paul Weller there, and I had to explain who he was.

In fact, the Waitrose in Marylebone had a significant part to play in the genesis of this column: it was after realising that I couldn’t afford the fancy mayonnaise, the one with the quote from Delia Smith on it, that I bumped into the then deputy editor of this magazine, after I’d crashed a book launch in Daunt’s bookshop up the road (free wine). He asked me how I was doing and instead of saying “Fine, and you?” I told him, at some length, how screwed I was. The Waitrose bag swung pathetically from my hand as I spoke. He reported back to his editor and the next day I got an email.

Anyway, back to the present: how the hell, I thought, is it now possible that Marylebone is incapable of sustaining a Waitrose? Has everyone left? Has London finally been hollowed out? (There is the idea that you have to be super-rich to shop at Waitrose. It is a myth.) I thought, too, of recent developments in Brighton: the Co-Op on Seven Dials, where I used to shop, is about to take over the nice wine shop and the café next to it so they can make their store bigger, even though you can actually see the larger branch of the same store 300 yards down the road. Waitrose shrinks; the Co-Op spreads, acting like Russia to the wine shop’s and the café’s Ukraine.

So it was with gloomy thoughts that I set off to Marylebone to discuss a project that is going to involve filming in the neighbourhood. Where to meet for lunch? Well, there was only one option: the Duke of Wellington on Crawford Street, once my local, and the home and business premises of one of my saviours in those days, the Guvnor. (Seasoned readers of this column will at this point suck on their cigarettes and say: “The Guvnor. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.”)

There was a time, after I left the area, when it looked as though the place was going to be closed down, and turned into obscenely expensive flats. But no. I got a call from Darren. The place had reopened. Darren! He was one of the staff at the Duke, and I wondered how long he would last. I was once being bought lunch there and he looked dubiously at the bottle of wine he was about to put on the table. “Here is your coats do roams,” he said. How we giggled.

Well, I was giggling on the other side of my face when I got the call from Darren: he had bought the pub and had brought it back to its former glory, and was inviting me round. I can’t remember if I was living in Scotland or Brighton then, or under a bridge, but I couldn’t make it; so I wished him well.

As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly, I thought as I left Baker Street Station, treading a route that I knew in my bones. But the Duke was as good as ever: and it was a joy to see Darren again. He now owns two pubs, which is two more than I ever will, and they thrive. The Duke is now more restaurant than pub, but it is still there, that’s the main thing. As we ate, I could see the church of St Mary’s, against whose walls my friend Razors and I would play night cricket until the police would arrive and tell us it was bedtime.

Later on, after I had bewailed the loss of the Waitrose to my friend, she said, “It’s just being refurbished,” and I looked closer at the photo, and, ah, yes, it does say that on the hoarding on the other window. So things aren’t as bad as I thought they were. I was also pleased to note that, in Marylebone, I cheered up, and was not unmanned by nostalgia. All I could think was: this place is looking nice today, and it was, for the weather was lovely. As for the project I mentioned, well, these things are always in the lap of the gods. And I remembered the previous verse in the proverb about the dog and its vomit: “The great God that formed all things both rewardeth the fool, and rewardeth transgressors.”