05/06/2026
Well. We did not have “ pays us an out of hours visit” on the bingo card this month. But it meant more than you could ever know.
The reason?
Almost three years ago now we learned that the the lease on our beautiful shop in couldn’t be renewed. Finding suitable premises was impossible. Plus we LOVED our Southgate home…Behind the scenes we were turning over every option. Go online only? Sell up? Quietly shut the doors on a 20 year old adventure? Closing a business that is failing is one thing. Closing one that is thriving, building and still growing is quite another.
The choice I ended up being faced with was literally staring me in the face. In the form of the enormous empty old tapas restaurant almost directly across from us. I dismissed it time and again. We weren’t ready. The numbers involved were terrifying. The landlords would laugh us out of town.
But British Land didn’t laugh. They looked at this independent toy shop with an enormous plan and chose to back it. In a shopping centre where the Apple Store, and a Zara, and a flagship M&S, and now the biggest SpaceNK in the country are among our neighbours. Which takes the sort of foresight and innovative thinking that Mary has been asking of the high street for years and years.
So, terrified, we went bigger. Five times bigger.
Many nights before we opened I sat up in the dark and genuinely wondered if this decision would be a triumph or the biggest mistake of my life.
We built the big, enormous jaw droppingly beautiful toy shop we always dreamed we might, if space, ambition and imagination were no object. We built that moment where a child (and their grown up) stops dead in the doorway and just… gasps. (That gasp is the whole job, honestly.) And we proved that people will make a special journey to visit an extraordinary store. They will come for miles. They will tell their friends. They will choose to visit this shopping centre over a different one because something unique exists here……[🍃continued in first comment……. 🍃]
