TV guru blasts giants for death of corner shops

The star, known for shows like the BBC's Mary Queen Of Shops and Mary Queen Of Charity Shops, fears the "seemingly unstoppable march" of supermarkets.

Writing in the Radio Times, Portas said that communities are being sacrificed for convenience.

Portas said: "The rise of the supermarket giants – and our love affair with them – is killing Britain's small shops.

"We're sacrificing not just our greengrocers, our butchers and our bakers, but also our communities for convenience.

"In 1954, St Albans was the unlikely starting point for this revolution when it was chosen as the pilot location for Tesco's first ever 'convenience store'."

She said: "The first shopkeepers to suffer from the onslaught of this new breed of self-service shops were the greengrocers, butchers and corner shops that have gradually disappeared from our high streets.

"But what worries me more is the seemingly unstoppable march of the supermarkets into pretty well every other product category – from fashion to financial services, homewares to hair salons, health and beauty to DIY."

Portas said that as lives become faster, there is clearly a place for convenience shopping.

"But in a world where some of the most efficient shopping is now online and supermarkets have killed off the final vestiges of human contact through the questionable benefits of 'self scanning', it's the remaining shops on our high streets that for many of us represent some of our most important social interaction."

She said that she herself grew up "knowing every shopkeeper in our town".

"I'd always be the one who volunteered to run errands. All our local shops delivered stuff to my mother's door – I'd come home from school and find one of them nattering away to her over a cup of tea and a slice of her home-baked Madeira.

"So when my mother died when I was 16, and I was the one who was left to look after the family, all our local shops were there to look out for us.

"It was the local butcher who was our greatest salvation, putting aside offcuts of meat, which I picked up on the way home from school, to feed my siblings and myself."

Portas described her local shopkeepers as "the cornerstones of family life".

She added: "I suppose I find it hard to imagine anything like the same level of support from the faceless mute on the till at Tesco."

Portas said she is not deluded enough to believe that all small shops deserved saving and many were not up to scratch – but many also were.

She continued: "The question, of course, is how can our small shops survive when they can't compete on price or range?

"I've always summed it up in three words: service, specialism and connectivity – to their local communities – and if they work with each other to create high streets we want to visit, they'll be stronger.

"Meanwhile, as shoppers, we can play our part, not out of sympathy or nostalgia but because by supporting local shops we benefit from a wealth of experience and personal attention to boot."

The full story appears in the latest issue of the Radio Times.