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Shannons in Forest Hill is great. A family run business with huge stock. It is bigger then the ED one used to be and bigger then CP or WD. Def recommend it! Easy to get to (7 mins) and you can park if you want to buy loads or hop on the 185 if getting something small/having delivered.

Newboy Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> There's a great family run independent garden

> centre called Alexander Nurseries in Sydenham.

> Great plants and you can have a coffee too! Close

> to Penge East station


It's great but definitely in Penge, though on the borders with Sydenham. #PostcodeWars ;)

So we'll have a very large Sainsbury's with a Morrisons close by, a Tescos just past Goose Green a Co-op and Iceland/M&S further along and then another Sainsbury's up the hill. I too wish we'd had another garden centre. Yet another example of a mixture of branded supermarkets presenting the illusion of choice.
Never mind the Garden Centre, which frankly wasn't great to start with, it's the demolishing of part of our station building that's disturbing me! It's part of the area's heritage and should have had protected status, with Waitrose forced to make do with it as is if they want to open a store there.

When the Garden Centre site was sold (which, no doubt, was a good deal for the site owner) the plans for the use of the site (library, shop, apartments) would not have left sufficient space for a full garden centre - needing both indoor and outdoor space - at best it would have left sufficient space for a large flower shop which also sold tools, pots & chemicals (i.e. the former 'shop' bit of the Garden Centre.) So Morrison's use of the space wouldn't have been 'instead of' a full garden centre.


Having M&S, Sainbury's, Morrisons and Tesco trading 'against' each other should be to the benefit of ED customers - competition generally does benefit customers.


Sadly, around ED the relatively small size (and relatively high value) of commercial sites means that a 'good' garden centre footprint will be hard to find/ cost justify any longer. For those who can, travelling slightly further to get to better/ bigger centres will prove OK - but of course, those without transport or ready access to transport will suffer.


For bulky items (gravel, compost etc.) some firms will deliver, thus to some extent offsetting this problem.

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    • But all those examples sell a wide variety of things,  and mostly they are well spread out along Lordship Lane. These two shops both sell one very specific thing, albeit in different flavours, and are just across the road from each other. I don't think you can compare the distribution of shops in Roman times to the distribution of shops in Lordship Lane in the twenty first century. Well, you can, but it doesn't feel very appropriate. Haa anybody asked the first shop how they feel? Are they happy about the "healthy competition" ?
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    • You've got a point.  Thinking Leyland and Screwfix too but this felt different.
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