Can London’s Chinatown survive the coronavirus?
- ‘A lot of restaurants are even planning to give up and give the shop back to the landlord’, one restaurant manager says
- Westminster Council, the local authority, is also looking at ways to bring back customers and commerce
Concern is growing that London’s Chinatown, the best known and largest in Europe and one of the city’s major tourist attractions, may not survive the tailwinds of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Although most of the hospitality and catering sector has been hit, with the UK economy shrinking by 20 per cent in April alone, a number of factors specific to Chinatown will make it even harder for the businesses of the area to recover.
“Unless there is a vaccine or a cure I don’t think Chinatown will recover for a long time,” said Hong Kong-born Wing Poon, manager of Tao Tao Ju Cantonese restaurant in Lisle Street.
Like many other Chinatown restaurants, it shut its doors more than a week before the lockdown that started on March 23, as business slumped.
“I feel sorry for the younger generation with rent and young people to look after. In three years, I will have my pension, so I’ll be OK. It’s just very sad. A lot of restaurants are even planning to give up and give the shop back to the landlord. Even if we can open next month the business won’t really pick up for another six months.”
Throughout lockdown, Chinatown has seemed like a ghost town, the two Chinese gateways opening onto eerily empty paved streets, with most of the restaurants boarded up. Lunar New Year banners and lanterns, still strung across the district’s epicentre of Gerard Street and Newport Place, are a reminder of more joyous celebrations that took place just before lockdown.