Papier-mâché - Lady In White
Like many other local shopping areas all over the country ours is slowly closing down as its life is leached away by the multi-national superstores.
When I first moved to the coast you could buy everything locally. There were two big supermarkets, one for each catchment area – and they weren’t close to each other. Now, there are six. Including a humongous 24 hours megastore. More recently Walmart arrived in the disguise of Asda and decimated another local borough.
And that isn’t including the smaller ‘local’ versions of the big supermarkets which are designed to inveigle themselves. They are pretty much everywhere.
Supermarkets arrive. They slash prices. Locals use them instead of using their local shops. Local shops go bust. Supermarkets put up their prices and there’s fuck all anyone can do because (QED) there is nowhere else left to shop.
Kings Road, St. Leonards is one such are. Here, shops are opening and closing pretty much on a weekly basis as shopkeepers trying desperately to survive fail. Generally there is a closing down sale followed by whitewash over the windows and a ‘to let’ sign. Then it starts all over again. It keeps the estate agents and solicitors in work, but it’s tears for everyone else.
The photo above is from a shop that has a nadge more je ne sais quoi. The papier-mâché lady in white doen’t pretend to be art (at least I don’t think it does), but it beats the whitewashed window approach. I wonder what will appear when the Lady goes? And I wonder how long, whatever it is, will last?
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