The Chips Are Down

It’s a good thing that Swanvale Halt isn’t just residential, but contains a variety of businesses, from a small supermarket right at the centre of the village, to a tattoo studio, including along the way a butcher and a baker. There are of course also the two cafés which make it a more sociable place.

But do we need so many fast-food outlets of different kinds? The same small row of businesses near the church includes, in addition to the cafés, a kebab shop and pizza takeaway of long standing, and now, joining them, a chicken outlet. I don’t know how else to describe it, as chicken is apparently the main selling point. ‘Shack’ doesn’t seem the right word, because it isn’t.

I have a conflicted attitude to these businesses. It’s good to see any commercial activity going on rather than every available property being converted into flats, no matter how welcome dwellings might be. Every business where people have to stand and wait to be served offers the chance of social contact which might not otherwise happen, and contributes to the development of a community conversation which would otherwise be poorer. I try to combat my snobbish dislike of the way they look (bright orange shopfronts in two cases) and concentrate on other factors such as the healthiness of the fare – the kebab shop has one of those rotating cones of unidentifiable meat which hasn’t been anywhere near an actual animal for a long time – or what the prevalence of such businesses implies about society, which is people having time neither to prepare their own meals at home, nor to sit and eat them somewhere else. And the kebab shop, even though it may be smarter than it once was since a minor refit and the new uniforms issued to its staff, produces the little polystyrene food boxes you find discarded remarkably widely across the parish, including in the churchyard and occasionally in the church itself, complete with the odd ketchup-daubed chip. Once, when we had a particularly troublesome set of youngsters hanging around, I had an angry encounter with a neighbour who threatened to ‘close the church down’ if we didn’t make more efforts to keep the teens away. Why us? I wondered. If it wasn’t for the kebab shop they’d be loitering somewhere else.

But of course, returning to a theme of my previous post, if there wasn’t a market for fast food outlets they wouldn’t exist, and if Chicken Empire (that’s not its name) doesn’t find one it won’t last. It’s social circumstance that produces them. When the supermarket opened, as long ago as 1930, the various grocers, greengrocers and other little shops around the parish were probably horrified, quite rightly in a way, but now we regard it as a cornerstone of community life and would rue the day were it ever to close. Perhaps the time may come when we will look back on the memory of a row of bright takeaways and shed a tear for things past.