Booze, Beans & Bhajis: The Story of the Corner Shop Timeshift

What is it about the British and the corner shop?

The corner shop's always been there for us - a British institution.

There are almost more corner shops than there are corners.

It was on the front line of what was happening in society from the 1940s

to the 1990s.

It saved our bacon during the Second World War and it also became a rite

of passage for new immigrants, including my family.

I'm Babita Sharma and I'm the daughter of shopkeepers and, for me,

the corner shop sits at the very heart of the community.

It's what Mum and Dad called the glory days and by that,

they meant a buzzing trade.

And I remember it really well - the shop being absolutely packed full of customers.

I would sit on the shop counter and see all walks of life come in

through those front doors and you'd know everything about them -

the paper that they read, their favourite box of cigarettes,

but above all else, you'd know all the gossip in the town.

This is a local shop for local people.

There's nothing for you here!

This unsung hero has been at the centre of ordinary lives

for more than 70 years.

Its death has been predicted many times, but still,

it soldiers on.

For the last decade,

it's been said that the days of the corner shop are numbered,

so just how has it managed to survive?

KER-CHING!

MUSIC: Open All Hours Theme

From the traditions of Open All Hours

to the idiosyncrasies of League Of Gentlemen,

everyone has their corner shop and a story to go with it.

Well, that'll be 9-97p, love.

Thank you. Oh, and d-don't worry about the 3p. Y-you can owe it me.

As a journalist, I'm interested in the role these small,

independent shops seem to have played in helping to shape Britain

into a modern, multicultural nation.

Today, I'm going back to our old corner shop,

VP Superstores in Reading,

which was owned and run by my mum and dad.

It looks completely different.

It's not how we had it, right?

Our grocery shelves were here.

And then, we had cakes on that side.

So, the till was this side, wasn't it?

No, the same side, yeah.

But wasn't it coming out this way?

-No, that way.

-Oh, OK.

Because here was the bread.

-And I remember us sitting here, right.

-Yeah.

For me and my sisters, this was our counter.

The shop was our home, our library, our play area.

-What year did you buy the shop?

-'77.

The year I was born, you bought the shop?

-You were four months old.

-'77, yeah.

The corner shop was clearly in my DNA,

but little did I know that I was

being born into a much bigger history.

You often hear that phrase, "We're a nation of shopkeepers,"

a nation that's been built on entrepreneurs

and that wealth and drive of ambition,

but I don't think I ever realised any of that when I was a kid

here in this corner shop.

I didn't realise that we were part of a much richer history,

a history that dates right back to the Victorian era.

In the 19th century,

suburbs were created to house an increasing urban population,

but they needed a local food supply.

And the Victorians came up with an ingenious solution.

Town planners created rows of houses and terraces, on which the house on

the corner of a junction of roads

was designed specifically to be a shop.

It would often have a large window, a door on the corner,

in order to attract the largest flow of traffic

and to serve that local community.

# Well, on the corner of the street

# Me and my baby, chose to meet... #

Corner shops became the backbone of the 1940s urban community,

but it seems their success was a product of circumstance -

we, literally, had no choice.

During the period of the Second World War,

when most food is rationed,

people have to register with their local shop,

in order to receive their food.

And so this is a period where the local shop really thrives,

in part, as a result of rationing.

Added to that, you have really much more restricted movement,

in part, because of petrol rationing,

but also because men are away at war,

women are working, and so people are spending less time travelling to the

centres of town, there's less money available.

And so, the local shop really comes into its own at this time.

An old corner shop has been preserved at the Folk And Transport

Museum in Northern Ireland.

This is what it would have looked like during World War II.

-Here we are.

-This looks amazing.

Chris Wilson grew up in the Belfast of the 1940s.

This to me is the late 1940s, early '50s.

And all the sweets!

Well, in those days, we didn't worry about our teeth.

You see, during the war, sweets were on ration.

He regularly helped out as an errand boy in his corner shop,

off the Shankill Road.

Because, of course, the war must

have had a big impact on what the corner shop was selling.

Yes, it did have, that is true. There were coupons.

You had your ration book

and you could only buy what your coupons allowed you to buy.

Eggs were on ration. Cheese, you had a cheese wire.

You lifted up the handle and cut the cheese.

-Really sharp?

-Yeah, sometimes you cut your finger,

but then you didn't tell the customer

there was blood on the cheese. You just wrapped it up.

Wrap it up and give it to them!

Health and safety didn't exist in those days.

Neither did the NHS,

but the corner shop stepped in, to provide a myriad of cheap,

over-the-counter medicines.

I and all of my friends in our little houses were lined up

by our mothers on a Saturday morning and we were given

either liquid paraffin, milk of magnesia or syrup of figs.

Gosh, that's a nice choice(!)

It wasn't all three at once, thank goodness!

But it was to give us moving experiences

and to keep the bowels clear.

She would buy that in the corner shop and then, on a tablespoon,

she would line up the wee ones and open your mouth and you got it in

and you got a piece of orange afterwards.

So, the corner shop was kind of your pharmacy and your newsagents

and your grocers and your butchers.

Yes, literally, you could buy anything in a corner shop.

-Morning, Mike!

-Well, what do you want?

A pair of pickled onion!

During the 1940s,

people shopped every day and the corner shop was where you came to

meet your neighbours, hear all the local news and, of course,

the local gossip.

-And I believe quite a bit of trouble yesterday, too.

-Aye, there was.

The corner shop was the social centre of two or three streets

and people talked about things.

They talked about interesting things.

"Have you heard about how he's off with so-and-so?"

"Have you heard about her? She's off with so-and-so?"

"Have you heard about so-and-so?"

"She's lording it over us, because she's got an artificial fur coat."

So, all this is happening as people come into a place like this,

just to be chatting away.

Yes, it was a social gathering of the area.

It was better than the local BBC. It picked up all the news.

Even well into the post-war era, we shopped in this very personal way.

This shop is just a minute or two away from Rotherham's main shopping

centre, but people rely on it for anything

from a packet of sugar to a paintbrush.

Customers pop in for just one or two items.

The retail landscape in Britain is completely different

to what we know today.

You would go into an independent shop and one or two people

would serve you, reaching goods from behind the counter,

packaging them up and serving you.

It was a slow encounter, quite a personal encounter.

-Farmhouse loaf?

-Yes, and 3 lbs of potatoes, please.

Very few people have fridges.

In fact, only 50% of people have refrigerators in 1969.

So, the corner shop provides a local close-by service

to buy perishable goods.

God forbid if you forgot anything, as the corner shop was closed on

Saturday at midday and didn't open again until Monday.

-Time you were off, Jane.

-All right. See you.

-Good night.

-Night.

But a shopping revolution was on the horizon.

The little corner shop was about to face its first big threat.

A transatlantic phenomenon has at last made its mark in British shops.

The self-service store.

Its apprenticeship is over and, according to the experts,

it's here to stay.

Someone once compared the self-service store with

a lending library and, except that you have to buy the goods,

that's the principle it works on. Choose for yourself.

There's no doubt that self-service completely

revolutionised the way that we shopped.

Some people reported at the time that they felt less scrutinised,

they weren't being judged.

And that was often the case of people who were perhaps poorer

or working class, particularly if they haven't been able

to afford for many goods. They would have felt more judged in the

environment of the small local shop.

In the supermarket, you sort of wander freely.

Because everything is on show and easy to reach,

housewives are finding shopping easier, quicker and more convenient.

In 1950, there were about 50 self-service shops.

By 1969, there's 3,400 self-service shops, so it grows really quickly.

And housewives hope it will cut out the queues.

The glamour and Americana of self-service made the corner shop

seem small, parochial and outdated.

It is now engaged in a David and Goliath battle with the supermarket.

Many corner shop owners simply decided that they had had enough

and it was time to sell up.

So, how was the corner shop going to survive?

Fortunately, help was at hand.

Waiting in the wings were a new generation of proprietors,

including my parents.

Mum came from Delhi in 1971 to marry Dad.

My great-uncle convinced Mum that she should take on a corner shop.

Why did you want to do it, have a shop?

Because you were never there, Dad.

You were always at Mars, in the factory.

And he said, "You're sitting at home, you're not doing anything."

Did you say, "Actually, I've got three kids to look after?"

She had to do something.

And he say, "OK, why don't you do a small shop?

"And when the customer comes, the bell will ring,

"and then you'll know the customer, go and serve the customer."

So, hold on, you were out the back of the shop, looking after me,

four months old, the bell rings and you run off and leave me?!

Charming!

So, why did so many Asians become shopkeepers at this time?

So, I guess there's nothing, there's no inherent link,

no particular racial or cultural link between South Asians

and running shops. What there is

is a set of circumstances, a set of historical circumstances.

A lot of the South Asian migration to Britain after World War II

comes because of a labour shortage in Britain,

so we see obviously the Northern mill towns,

there's huge recruitment from the Subcontinent for workers.

And that's partly because the white labour class in the north

doesn't want to do that night shift,

so there's a bit of reticence about doing that night shift.

So, Asians are recruited to do that work.

But this was the 1960s and if you were an immigrant,

the chances of gaining promotion were slim.

The labour market is much more difficult for Asians than their

white counterparts. Facing discrimination in the labour market,

one of the only options was to work for yourself.

And that's one of the reasons that

Asians did go into running corner shops.

The Asian corner shop provided a wealth of exotic goods that

couldn't be bought anywhere else.

But, to be really successful depended on whether it could break

out of a specialist market,

and take on the Arkwrights of this world.

-We've never met. I'm Gupta.

-Well, I'm very sorry to hear that.

Open All Hours tackled this transition shopkeeper to shopkeeper.

I thought you were looking a bit peaky.

I've got just the thing for you, Sir.

Try this, three times a day, after meals.

-The name is Gupta. Albert Gupta.

-74p, Albert.

Don't get me wrong. We're colleagues.

I'm in the same line of business.

Me, too. I'm a Yorkshire shopkeeper.

So, what are you doing in these p-parts, then?

I've been studying to make my little place just like this -

borderline seedy.

I've got this good steady Indian clientele.

No bother at all. It's the Yorkshire customers.

They're very weird customers to crack.

Between you and me, sometimes I wish they'd all bog off back to York!

As it happened, the very success of the supermarket revolution, which so

threatened the corner shop, would now come to its aid.

The rise of the supermarket in the late 1960s

and through to the 1970s is, in part,

because of increased amounts of cars on the road.

People can travel further to their supermarkets.

Because working habits are changing.

Women are working more and, therefore, doing one weekly shop

makes life much easier.

And also because, slowly, people have refrigeration

and, therefore, are able to shop less frequently.

This meant we still needed a local place to top up our shopping

and buy our newspapers.

And events in East Africa were about to change the corner shop for ever.

On the 4th of August 1972, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin

ordered the expulsion of the country's entire Asian population.

Asians have kept themselves

apart, as a closed community,

and have refused to integrate.

Amin condemned the Asian minority, calling them blood-suckers.

Uganda's Asians were the business class,

making up only 1% of the population, but controlling 90% of wealth.

The reasons the Ugandan Asians ran a lot of the trade and commerce was,

again, it's not some inherent link,

it was part of a system of colonial governance.

So, what we have in Uganda is that, in the early colonial period there,

Africans are not allowed to go into trade, they are banned by law,

and Asians are not allowed to own land, at that point,

so, actually, there's a kind of racial division of labour,

through colonial control that means that the Ugandan Asians that

are finally expelled in 1972 and come to Britain

have experience in that trade.

A ready-made nation of shopkeepers was about to arrive on our doorstep.

Among the first was Abdul Gani Ismail and his family.

Abdul's father Kassam was a successful shop owner.

He was one of the first people in Uganda to own a Mercedes

and he employed over 200 workers.

He was a close friend of Idi Amin and his ministers,

so until the end, he never thought he would get kicked out.

So, your father thought that

being a friend of Idi Amin,

"I'll be protected, I'll be OK. I'm a wealthy businessmen here."

-That's right.

-But actually that wasn't the case?

-It didn't work.

In the end, Idi Amin told him himself, he said, "Look,

"I can't control my generals," and, in the end, my father decided that,

"Look, we've got to get out." And we only had seven days left

before the deadline.

Abdul's father abandoned the big house, the servants,

the Merc and came to London, with six children to support

and only 50 quid in his pocket.

We were, literally, riches to rags.

Overnight, we were paupers.

We ended up in a refugee camp in Somerset,

in a little village called Watchet.

Watchet was one of 15 rehousing camps set up by the Government.

In an effort to showcase British culture and help assimilation,

they came up with some interesting entertainment.

Good evening to you all.

Tonight, we have a different kind of entertainment from what we had

before. Mrs Jones and her merrymakers from Newbury

portray the kind of songs that my grandfather and grandmother

used to sing.

# I'm Henry VIII, I am

# Henry VIII, I am, I am... #

In Uganda, our lifestyle was good and, here,

we are like on the begging bowl. My mum washing-up.

She had to wash the clothes, dry them outside.

It's not easy in winter.

And yet, in Uganda, she had housemaids,

servants that did everything.

Cutting up the onions, washing the clothes.

So, overnight, their life was more difficult than ours.

# I'm Henry VIII, I am

# Henry VIII, I am... #

Abdul and his family spent four months in the detention centre.

His father was determined to start again, as a shopkeeper.

And my father was one of those guys, he said,

"You're not going in the welfare system,

"because I know if it gets into your blood, you will never work.

"You will enjoy it."

# Henry VIII, I am. #

So, in the end, he said, "One day I'm going to start my own shop."

And he did.

Eventually, they saved up enough money to buy a small shop

in Easton in Bristol, where rents were cheap.

He would work from 7:30am to 1:30am.

He would sell the milk, bread in the morning.

At night, the taxi drivers would finish

and they would want their chicken pilau or biryani.

There was nothing like,

what do you call, onion bhajis or chicken jalfrezis in those days.

It was what we ate in Africa is what he cooked and people loved it.

But not everyone received such a warm welcome.

During the early 1970s, 27,000 Asians came to the UK,

sparking a wave of protests from far-right groups.

We've taken a petition down to the Home Office and we're asking him to

have some common sense about this.

We have a million unemployed.

We can't squeeze up many more.

Leicester Council even took out an advert in the Ugandan press,

warning migrants not to come, as they were full.

Where are you going to live when you get to Britain,

-are you going to stay anywhere in particular?

-London, W12.

And, in fact,

I wouldn't go down to Southall or Leicester or some other places,

you know? Where there is already an influx of immigrants.

Not everyone was so well-informed.

Actor Nitin Ganatra is a familiar face,

playing the character Masood in EastEnders.

He grew up in a corner shop,

having arrived from Kenya when he was just three-years-old.

His family moved to Coventry,

but little did they know, they were setting up shop

next door to the National Front.

When they first came over, do you think they were accepted?

No, we weren't accepted, at all.

No, We were the first Asians in the neighbourhood.

There was a lot of racism.

That was at the time when the National Front

were based in Coventry,

and so, shops were targeted.

I remember people throwing

stuff at the shop, trying to smash the shop down.

You know, my mum being spat at, my dad being beaten up.

I mean, that was...

But weirdly enough, as you grow up, you kind of go, "Well,

"that's just normal, right?"

Asian shops are particular targets for attacks.

Oh, I do feel sorry for him in the shop there.

I do, really. They broke into that about six times.

All the Asian shopkeepers we met were too scared to speak.

It is. It's a shame, really, what they do to him in there.

It was hardly the start Nitin and his family imagined they'd have in

prosperous Britain - far removed from the fairy-tale.

There's no fairy-tale about it.

We had no money. My mum was wearing flip-flops in the snow.

We were catching the bus, because we didn't have a car.

We were catching the bus to go to the cash and carry,

to fill up the shop to sell stuff.

I was old enough to carry a box of crisps.

That's about it. I was four or five-years-old.

And so, it was really through sheer hard work.

There was nothing romantic about it.

Taking on a corner shop catapulted immigrants like Nitin's family right

onto the front line of racism in 1970s Britain.

In the corner shop, there was nowhere to hide.

So, why did they do it?

It's in our DNA.

We were born to do this.

The principle for most Indians were, "Now we're free of the colonials,

"we're going to be our own masters.

"We're not going to work for anyone else."

And it's a very political... It's a small,

emotional and political revolution for an Indian mentality

to, kind of, push that through line

all the way to becoming an entrepreneur

-and being your own boss.

-Yeah.

-And having your own shop?

-And having your own business,

whether it be a shop, whatever it is. You are your own boss.

The way my father would say it in Gujarati would be,

"I don't want to be bending my knees to anyone else."

# What you do, man?

# I think I'll go on down the corner.#

No matter where your shop was, there was just one chance,

one chance, to run a business and make it work.

For many like Mum and Dad,

it was tough, but customers saw the benefit of having

their corner shop back.

But how did we turn a profit when others had failed before us?

Well, we opened on a Sunday.

We also imported our own business model

and that included uncosted, free family labour.

In our shop in Reading, no-one got out of doing a shift

and there was no pay for all this hard work -

other than eating as many sweets as we could get our hands on -

in secret, of course.

But my parents remember things a little differently.

We would do quite a lot in the shop.

-Oh, yeah, yeah.

-Yes, you did.

-Stack the shelves?

No, the girls used to do that.

In this shop, we used to stack all the shelves.

-Sometimes.

-Sometimes, yeah.

We used to do the Pedigree Chums, the toilet rolls,

-the cigarettes.

-Yeah.

Embassy Number 1s, Silk Cut,

Lambert and Butler.

Don't say this!

Do you not remember that?

I wasn't the only one.

Comedian Sanjeev Kohli also grew up working

in his family's Glasgow shop.

It directly inspired his comedy.

It is Ramesh Mahju here. I am taking this opporchancity to showcase,

in all my glory, my small to medium retail concern.

Yes, my shop!

Fags, Mags and Bags.

Come and meet the staff.

COUGHING

Together with Donald McLeary, they write and record the Radio 4 sitcom,

Fags, Mags and Bags,

which mines the world of the corner shop for comic effect.

OK, chaps.

Give it a run through, all right?

-Take one, rolling away.

-Look, that's Sanjeev coming out now.

He's holding a box with a ribbon on it.

Ah, it is exciting.

A new edition to the Lenzie firmament.

I mean, the way we've written the show is, basically,

my character's the dad.

Dave, who's Donald's character, is basically the mum

-and you've got the two sons.

-Yeah.

And the family dynamic is something you see in shops all the time.

Can we get it, Dad? Can we get it, can we get it, can we get it?

Sanjay, who is the surly son who hates doing shifts in the shop,

was certainly based on a shop near us,

where I went in once and there was really, really loud drum and bass

and an incredibly surly 14-year-old with a beanie hat - like that,

hating his life, hating his dad.

You know, honestly,

I'm surprised he sold anything.

This, of course, is my son and your great-nephew, Sanjay.

I mean great in the genealogical sense,

as he's arrogant, at best. Sanjay, do not slouch. India is watching.

-Where is your name tag?

-'Sake!

Sanjay, one of the characters, I couldn't believe this

when I heard it, he gets pocket money from his dad for doing shifts

in the shop.

I mean, I never got pocket money.

Did you get pocket money as a family for doing shifts your the shop?

We got an edict from Radio 4 that they said,

basically, you have to give Sanjay pocket money,

otherwise its child exploitation.

-That's not true.

-Yes.

-We all know that, basically...

-No, it was a fair note.

-Yeah. That's not actually true though.

Yeah, I know,

you basically got paid by how many chocolates you could cram in your

-mouth. That was your payment.

-Yeah.

-You know, the rogue Yorkie.

"Oh, I did a Yorkie count. There seem to be five missing."

And your mum would say that, but she knew what had happened.

It had been straight down your gullet. That was your payment.

Ho! What are you doing with those Magnums?

The plural is of Magnums is Magna, actually.

Yes, very good, clever shoes.

Ah, come on, boys, we don't get high on our own supply.

You've taken those Magna out of a child's mouth!

Fags, Mags And Bags is about the minutiae of the corner shop.

"To a dear auntie."

Auntie, there, although it's a picture of a lion

with some kind of degree.

The writers believe that what we buy tells the shopkeeper who we are.

As a shopkeeper, you know people's business.

You can second-guess their business from the stuff they buy.

From the magazines they buy. We've always said,

if someone comes into a shop and buys isotonic Lucozade

-and a wordsearch, it's a hospital visit.

-Yeah.

They're going to visit someone in hospital.

If they buy a bottle of scotch and a Twix,

you need to do an intervention.

Anyway, I wanted to show his Bishopness

your range of toilet wizards.

You always make a connection. If you go to a shop every day,

even if you don't want to make a connection, you have done,

because when you go to the supermarket,

-you very rarely get served by the same person.

-Yeah.

In fact, you probably never do.

-I'm not really that bothered, Mrs Bay.

-No, your Highness,

if someone of your stature is going to bear his, you know, bum-bum,

to the toilet, and there's going to be possible splashback issues,

then you should be able to choose the flavour.

It's hard-hitting social commentary.

-That's what we're all about.

-Yeah.

# Ooh, what's the power? #

By the 1980s,

50% of independent corner shops were taken over by Asian families.

The traditional corner shop had now evolved into something

completely more diverse.

The Asian shopkeeper was now a key figure at the heart

of the community. That's paved the way for a new generation

of migrants to take on the corner shop.

Revolution in Iran would propel another wave of migrants

on to the British high street.

Yesterday saw the worst clashes on the streets of Tehran

for several weeks.

Oh, God, I thought you were married by now.

Farhad and his son Arzhang escaped the revolution

and went straight into the corner shop business in Wolverhampton.

All right?

Do you remember the first day that you opened up the shop?

Yes. I remember, it was the 22nd of June,

1987.

The first customer that came in asked for half an ounce

of Golden Virginia.

I didn't have a clue what he was asking for.

When I served the customer, I said, "What is it?"

He said, "Tobacco. "They roll it and they smoke it."

That's how it started.

After six months,

I knew every single name of nearly 1,300 items in the shop.

And staying true to corner-shop tradition,

the shockwaves of world events were discussed over the shop counter.

The newsagent is where you went to get your news.

So, people would start to immerse themselves in conversation.

You know, all you have to do is pick up a copy of the newspaper.

It was about immigrants or lesbians.

And they'd have their tuppenceworth, "Oh, bloody immigrants,

"bloody lesbians." That would then stimulate debate

with the shopkeeper and if the shopkeeper

happened to be half-Iranian, half-English, like I was,

or Iranian, like dad, it would, kind of, broaden the horizons -

both of yourself and the person that was talking to you.

But I think it's just the idea of it being a community hub,

the newsagents, in this country.

The corner shop, or the newsagents, as Arzhan calls it,

was more than just a shop.

Sometimes, running one called for special personal skills.

I had a customer who was a very, very educated man, well-spoken.

One day he came and I said, "Tom, what is the matter?

"You look very upset and sad."

He started crying.

And I came around and I put my hand, very, very proud man,

I put my hands around his shoulder and said, "What is the matter, Tom?"

And he put his head on my shoulder and started crying and he said,

"Betty died."

Betty was his wife.

That is the part of life, that is the part of my life,

which I'll never, ever forget.

I'm not only as shopkeeper, I'm a part of community.

But during the 1980s, many of these communities faced tough times.

The People's March For Jobs reached a climax this afternoon with a march

through central London.

# I went to the bank just to get a little money

# When he told me the requirements I started feeling funny

# They said you ain't got a house You ain't got a plug

# I ain't got a window and I ain't got a job. #

Britain was in the grip of a recession

and the country was buckling under the strain of mass unemployment

and growing social divisions.

The Tory government needed good news stories and the corner shop owner

became the poster boy for the new entrepreneurial society

championed by Margaret Thatcher.

Mrs Thatcher's larder is stocked as prosaically as any housewife's.

And she wondered, in anticipation, if there weren't a couple of useful

shops around the corner from Ten Downing Street.

Brown bread.

New Zealand butter and English.

Asian shopkeepers have been incredibly useful to the Tory party.

The image of the shopkeeper is a powerful one and the image of

the Asian shopkeeper is very useful across the political spectrum,

as a symbol of something like hard work or aspiration.

-You were turned out of Uganda?

-Yes.

Well, at least it's better news from there this morning.

But it's also a very convenient way of suggesting that we live in

a meritocracy that we don't live in, right?

So that it's used as a way to suggest to the working-class

that you should be able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

So, I think the idea of the Asian shopkeeper has been really useful,

politically, for that reason.

One success story was Lord Dolar Popat.

He arrived from Uganda, penniless.

He started working as a shopkeeper,

became a multimillionaire and is now a member of the House of Lords.

I think Mrs Thatcher made a big difference.

She herself was a shopkeeper's daughter.

And she realised, she understood,

small businesses very well. She encouraged small businesses.

So, I think there was some recognition of those East African,

British Indians coming to this country, running a shop,

how hard-working they are and she realised that our values of hard

work, education, enterprise, family

were the values of the Conservative Party.

In the 1980s,

you were seven times more likely to be a millionaire if your name was

Patel, than if your name was Smith.

Shops was the starting point to become a successful businessman.

The shop is where you do your buying, your selling,

your VAT return, you do your own accounts.

The longer the hours you put into the shop,

the more money you can make.

The more the family help came in, the less the wage costs,

the higher the profit,

the more the banks want to lend you money

and expand and grow for a second shop, third shop, more.

By the mid-1980s, Dolar had built a business empire, but for him,

it wasn't just about making money.

I think one thing that did help us, which is very, very important,

it helped us to integrate.

In a way, we learnt the art of talking to people,

engaging with people, learning English.

And to make a success in this country, integration is key.

In difficult economic times,

self-made millionaires like Dolar Popat were the exception,

rather than the rule.

A stereotype had been born.

# Ladies and gentlemen May I please have your attention.

# My name is Abdul.

# I'm wanting to tell you the story of my success.

# It all began when I was a little boy.

# My mother said to me,

# "Don't bop, my son Go out and buy a corner shop."

# Behind the counter of his corner shop

# Making trillions... #

It was at this time that a loaded term entered our vocabulary.

It was even acceptable to use it on prime-time TV.

What's the point? All the animals will be dead.

We won't to be able to grow nothing,

because all the earth will be contaminated.

Where are we going to get something to eat?

Bound to be a little Paki shop open somewhere.

I think that it's probably not uncommon for there to be plenty of

communities still in the UK where it is completely normal to refer to it

-as the Paki shop.

-Where does that come from, that term?

I think it comes from the fact that lots of Asians owned corner shops.

What I never understood about the expression was the logic of it.

I would call something a Paki shop if, A,

I thought that was an acceptable shortening of Pakistani,

which it isn't, because you can call an Australian an Aussie,

the reason for that is that you don't see, "Aussies go home"

on a brick wall. You see, "Pakis go home" on a brick wall.

It attained that connotation just by osmosis.

But also, what exactly is Pakistani about the shop?

The Brillo pads aren't Pakistani, the Cuppa Soups aren't Pakistani,

the bin bags aren't Pakistani.

Why can't you just say, "the corner shop" or "the shop?"

I never understood what the ethnicity of the family

that run it had anything to do with it.

It was completely irrelevant.

You know what I mean? That's what got me.

And for Farhad, his ethnicity was also irrelevant.

This slur had become a catchall term

to throw at any successful shopkeeper who wasn't white.

What would they say to you, when you say there were names, rude names?

"You're a bloody Paki, what are you doing here?"

-The usual thing.

-How did you deal with that?

How did you deal with the racism?

He's not Pakistani for starters, which is always interesting.

As soon as they tell me, I said,

"Hang on, you want to wait and listen,

"or do you want to continue to say what you want to say?

"Well, go off, bugger off.

"If you want to know, I'm not Pakistani.

"It starts with P, but I'm Persian, not Pakistani."

Verbal abuse at times escalated into violent confrontation.

Sunday after Sunday, white youths,

encouraged by the atmosphere created by the National Front,

went on the rampage, breaking shop windows

and attacking passing Asians.

The sight of the shopkeeper apparently doing well

during an era of recession lit the touchpaper among far-right groups.

-THEY CHANT:

-Rights for whites!

In the East End of London,

the openly-racist British National Party take to the streets.

The BNP want all the non-whites to leave Britain.

And they are marching in an area where racial attacks,

mostly on Asians, have tripled in two years.

Asians say it's a provocation that can lead to violence.

The idea of the successful Asian shopkeeper bred some resentment.

The 1985 film My Beautiful Launderette

shakes this dangerous cocktail.

Leave it out!

Why are you working for these people?

Pakis.

It's work, that's why.

I want to do some work for a change instead of always hanging around.

-What, are you jealous?

-No, I'm angry, Johnny.

I don't like to see one of our blokes grovelling to Pakis.

But they came over here to work for us.

That's why we brought them over, OK?

The Asian shopkeeper is attacked,

partly as a symbol of a, kind of, working-class resentment

of people who seem to be making money in a time of national crisis.

Don't cut yourself off from your own people.

Having a corner shop was the dream for many migrants

in the 1960s and 70s,

but the dream was beginning to tarnish.

The corner shop was increasingly seen as a soft target,

a vulnerable space with little security and wide open to attack.

Violent attacks on staff at small,

local shops have risen dramatically over the past year.

Convenience stores are increasingly being seen as easy targets.

A shopkeeper has been talking about the moment he fought off a masked

robber who fired a crossbow at him.

The corner shop owner often had to defuse very tricky situations.

Even in dangerous moments, where, on a Sunday morning,

there's been banging on the door at 4am,

and there's been guys who have been...

Who are high on ecstasy and drunk, who were banging on the door, going,

"Oh, yeah, open the shop! Open the shop!"

And my brother does.

And I'm standing there going, "Oh, this is going to kick off."

My brother will go...

And they'll be this really...

palpable...tension,

where then, my brother will go, "Hello, Robert, how's your mum?"

And then this Robert guy would just go, "All right, Charlie."

"And he'd go, "Are you OK? You going to get home all right?"

"Yeah, I'm fine." But you'd think it was going to kick off,

because it could. It could go either way.

But my brother's just brilliant at being able to dissipate that.

Having said that, you know, he's seen his fair share of grief from...

-And racial abuse from lots of people, from kids to adults.

-Yeah.

The success of the shop could often dependent on the personality of the

shopkeeper. Something exploited in the cult comedy, Still Game.

Am I the crazy one here?!

MUSIC SMOTHERS WORDS

It tapped into the stereotype

of the Asian shopkeeper, who only had his wits to protect him.

I'm not listening to you, Isa. I'm listening to my iPod.

Go and talk your bullshit to somebody who gives a toss.

The character was played by none other than Fags,

Mags And Bags writer, Sanjeev Kohli.

For very good socioeconomic reasons, a lot of...

Mostly Asian families run shops, all over the UK and in Scotland.

And they're in sometimes pretty poor areas.

There's going to be envy. They're the guys driving the tan Mercs.

So, they have to develop their own kind of shield to avarice and envy

and violence, frankly.

And, you know, you can't take a baseball bat

to every kid that comes in and tries to steal from you

or calls you racist names.

So, what you do is you develop sarcasm, you develop humour.

You develop patter - bants.

So many people, probably triple figures now, have said,

"Oh, did the boys base Navid on our shopkeeper?"

Well, yes and no. They based it on one particular shopkeeper,

but it's a generation of shopkeepers that, like I say,

have this fantastic hybrid accent, for a start, which is a joy to play.

I based it on the Govanhill area of Glasgow,

which I can dae nae bother, cos it's a place I know very well, you know?

My dad doesn't speak like that, but Navid looks a bit like my dad,

cos my dad is a turban Sikh, so as soon as I straighten my back

and push my gut out...

-HE IMITATES HIS DAD'S ACCENT:

-..my dad speaks more like this, you know?

But I do think that humour thing is very, very important.

Are you all right, Navid?

Aye.

Full of beans.

I play him very deadpan.

But, actually, a lot of shopkeepers I know, they are.

It's almost like, I don't want to give anything away.

It's almost like they're prowling.

No touching. "You touch it, you pay for it."

That kind of thing. The body language is always like this.

"What are you doing?" So, it kind of becomes that anyway and a lot

of shopkeepers adopt that body language and that kind of attitude.

Bubbalicious, 25p.

Snickers, 40p.

I don't even have to smell your breath.

Cheesy Wotsits, 25p.

I'm sorry about this, Mr Harrid.

Oh, these things happen. Kids will be kids.

HE SNIFFS

You dirty bastard.

Poppets, 30p.

But kids nicking things from the shop was the least of your worries.

In the early 1990s, out of nowhere, a bigger threat loomed -

Sunday trading.

Let's be honest -

corner shops have been exploiting a loophole in a very unclear law.

What you could and couldn't buy according to the 1950 Shop Act

was completely bizarre.

There's a famous saying that you could buy pornography on a Sunday,

but not a Bible. And corner shops, many of them like ours,

for 40 years, traded illegally on a Sunday.

But that all changed.

In 1994, the big supermarkets said, "Enough is enough."

They wanted to cash in on the money that corner shops were making and

they, too, wanted to open up on a Sunday.

Sunday in England and Wales will never be the same again,

after last night's Commons vote.

The government plans to turn Sunday into a family shopping day.

I think the main people who will benefit from this are the millions

of people who already shop on Sundays.

There was a warm welcome for the vote by the big out-of-town stores.

Small shopkeepers say they'll be trampled by the giants.

It's devastating.

The reaction of Sunday opening has not only took the customers away

from us, it's halved the day's trading.

And I feel, if this carries on much longer,

all the small businesses will go to the wall.

Overnight, the corner shop profit margin dropped drastically.

Up to 50% of weekly takings had been made on a Sunday.

The corner shop now felt the full blast of corporate competition

and by the 1990s, many corner shop owners, including Mum and Dad,

were getting out.

A great British institution, the Asian corner shop,

could soon be a thing of the past.

New research suggests up to 4,000 have disappeared

over the past decade.

The face of Britain is changing.

Tonight, we wanted to mourn the passing of one British tradition -

the Asian corner shop.

Once open all hours, according to the British Retail Consortium,

the last one will be gone by 2015.

# Closing time

# Open all the doors and let you out into... #

Perhaps that was a bit overdramatic, but for my family,

it was, indeed, the end of the road.

For some, the shop was just a means to an end,

to educate their children and make money.

But, for others, such as our family, it was a way of life.

What was going through your mind when you decided to sell?

It was getting a bit too much.

Plus, we were tired.

Very tired.

It was time to sell the shop.

-So...

-Were you sad?

-When I go to the town,

and I see all my customers, they say,

"Hello, Mrs Sharma, we're missing you. How are you?"

And their children, they say, "Oh, that's Mrs Sharma."

-"You know?

-Mm.

-Then, I felt something, you know. Yeah.

Like my parents, Farhad worked 14 hours a day,

almost seven days a week.

He was completely exhausted.

But worried about the future of his shop.

Because it's a small corner shop

and you are so connected to your community...

..you couldn't leave the shop with anybody, unless you made sure

your ideology, your principals, were carried on.

But there was a problem.

My generation, born and brought up in the UK,

didn't want to take on the shop.

Arzan became a playwright.

I think the...

The hours, the physical strain of actually running

the shop were immense. I mean, they were 14-hour days.

They were huge days.

I became a journalist. Sanjeev became a comedian.

What you've got now is the next generation, who have options.

And, you know, it is hard work.

And the whole point was to educate the kids,

so they didn't have to work in shops.

So, that's why they don't want a part of it any more.

And the fact is they can become optometrists

and they can work on the make-up counter at Boots and, yeah,

there are options. You know, this, kind of, low-return retail thing,

as lucrative as it can be, it's a lot of hours

and it's a lot of graft.

So, it's no surprise there is a generation that aren't interested

in taking over. I do know, genuinely,

of a family, where there was a son, who was a lawyer,

and the daughter was a doctor, and they still did shifts

in the shop. I'm assuming that's not what the dad wanted for them.

But that is what happened.

So, it's strange tension.

Nitin became an actor, but his family are hanging on.

We've still got the shop.

And my mum and dad still get up at 3:30am and do the papers with

my brother, who runs the shop for my dad.

And when I go back, I do the same sort of stuff.

Having worked so hard to make the shop a success and make it the focal

point of the community, Nitin's family were not ready to let it go.

It's a tricky situation.

My brother provides a service that supermarkets won't provide,

which is a personal service. He knows what you want.

He knows what you like. He knows what paper you read.

When customers come in, it's already on the counter

and he has a conversation with you.

But my brother's been working in the shop since he was a kid.

And he's going to...

He's 60.

So, I worry for him. My brother hasn't had a holiday.

-I think he's had a holiday three times in 40 years.

-Mm.

Yeah, we didn't really get many holidays.

No, cos, again, the papers need to be done.

-It's seven days a week.

-Yeah. It's seven days a week.

There were other reasons why the next generation were wary.

The supermarkets, which had earlier abandoned the town centre,

were back, muscling in on the corner shop's traditional turf -

the high street.

This fairly recent phenomenon of the supermarkets now moving on to the

high street, with much smaller stores, is really interesting.

And I think it reflects something about how people are changing their

shopping habits. So, although people still do a big shop,

they are often picking up the odd special item or topping up

their shopping, so I think it's partly to do with that.

It's also partly to do with, you know, more people living single

or not in family households, or living in mixed households

in urban areas, not wanting to do a great, big shop.

It takes entrepreneurial guile to take on the supermarket giants.

And many corner shops have decided to call it a day

or become part of an independent franchise, like Spa or Nisa.

Sweet Mart in Bristol started life as a small corner shop in 1969.

But a few years ago, Abdul was ready to shut up shop.

From here, you can see Tesco, anyway, one of the supermarkets.

On the other side, you've got Sainsbury's. Four or five years ago,

I really thought we would have to wind up and close and forget it.

The supermarkets were getting stronger.

We were weaker.

We didn't have enough staff.

But Sweet Mart now seemed to have a winning formula -

luring customers with bespoke offerings, from local organics

to home-made curries.

Come here, I'll show you our Aladdin's Cave.

Aladdin's cave, wow!

All the foods you can buy from the world. All the spices.

People want to eat healthy.

You know, recession can come and go.

The one thing people won't cut too much is on food.

So, you've got all the vegetables.

Indian vegetables, all different vegetables.

This is what you were on about, isn't it? Karela.

-Karela, my favourite!

-Yeah.

-And the chilies?

-The chilies there.

All different types.

40 years ago, if I had an English customer and there was a couple of

chilies left in the basket, I'd say, you can have it.

And they would turn round and say, "No, no, no, we don't eat that."

Today, we've got English customers, who will buy a kilo

and they'll ask you, "Do you have bullet chilies?"

You know, people have changed.

They know a lot more. They know what kind of spices to buy.

This truly is spice heaven, isn't it?

This is where we do different kinds of spices, which you won't get in

supermarkets. For example, Zulu fire spice.

What is this?

-Zulu...

-It'll blow your socks off.

Is it really chilli? Hot?

-It's quite hot.

-Then, Moroccan harissa spice.

People travel a lot. Air travel is cheaper.

If you've been abroad, you've eaten something,

you want to try it at home. We've got it.

Over here, you've got West Africans dried fish and prawns.

-Oh, yeah. Gosh.

-And this is...

This is world famous now. We're known for it. Bombay duck.

It's actually dried fish.

Ugh... OK.

Not sure about the dried fish, but Abdul's tactic has proved

successful. They now own the whole row.

So, we're still the old corner shop, but we are an extended corner shop.

And they have a strong, local following, as well.

How come you come here and not to some of the other supermarkets?

Because it's got everything.

We were just looking round and I've never seen so many spices and

-vegetables.

-Yeah. Yeah, basically, if you want to create anything

-exotic and exciting for your dinner, then come here.

-You come here.

Sweet Mart is not alone.

There is an emerging trend of specialised corner shops.

In fact, the corner shop market is expected to increase by 17%,

to £44 billion, over the next five years.

But is this really the corner shop as we have known it?

If we were to transport ourselves back to the 1950s and to walk into

a local corner shop, convenience store, at that time,

I think what we'd have been struck by

is the very limited range of foods available.

And that has clearly completely transformed within living memory.

And, so, now what you see is that people are obsessed with food.

Our travel has meant we're much more adventurous about what we will eat

and what we won't eat.

And also, our population has changed.

And the changing population has completely transformed

the corner shop landscape.

The corner shop has constantly reinvented itself since the 1940s.

In the way that only small, independent retailers can.

It's been a rite of passage for migrants,

who've made our community more diverse.

And, for the past decade, we've seen the rise of Polish shops,

Latvian delis, all selling their own specialised products.

In this new Brexit era, there are those who would say

that the corner shop and its diversity may come under threat,

but I don't see it like that.

The corner shop is too much a part of everyone's way of life.

We can't seem to get the corner shop out of our minds.

It's always been there for us,

whether we are buying a box of Milk Tray or a bag of Bombay mix.

And today's shopkeepers, well, they're just like mum and dad.

They're a new wave of immigrants,

reflecting a changing face of Britain.

And I can see it.

I can see it right now, my history repeating itself.

It's a special little place. A trusted friend.

A place where we can celebrate the local.

And I just hope that it stays for generations to come.

# There's dancing behind movie scenes

# Behind the movie scenes Sadi rani. #