EXCLUSIVE – Matthew Steeples reports on coronavirus and the lack of Arabic arrivals killing off Knightsbridge’s most expensive ‘convenience’ store, Lord’s Food & Wine of Brompton Road
Lord’s Food & Wine at 209 Brompton Road, SW3 was a shop you only ever went into when you were drunk, deranged, desperate (or all of the above). It was grotty and grim and known only for its truly extortionate prices, but to its credit, this favourite of both High Net Worths and the homeless was open 24/7, 365 days per year. This ‘convenience’ store was reliably dreadful, but, today, it was finally locked up and locked up and shuttered for once and for good.
Run by the rudest staff imaginable and featuring a pungent smell of samosas that never escaped its price unconscious patrons, here was a shop where a magnum of vodka could be had for £1,000 a pop whilst they’d flog you something as unlovely as Blue Nun for “just” £18.50 a bottle. They even sold Whispering Angel for those desperate to be “a banger” – but even that rotten rose was marked up from about £22 to an astounding £60.
Aside from visits that emptied my student loan fund in the early 2000s to buy ‘Mother’s Ruin-esque’ gin that I now wouldn’t serve to even the barbarian bear slaying bitch Larysa Switlyk let alone my dearest friends, I especially remember having to walk over to Lord’s on Christmas Day last with a chain smoking twit of a girl from Tunbridge Wells. She would have been utterly unremarkable in any other circumstance, but was so desperate for cigarettes that she was ridiculously in a torrent of uncontrollable tears.
Said spoilt Norah Docker-esque madam was astounded at the £18 price per twenty fags, but promptly handed me the bill for the four packs she claimed to require. I cannot say I’ll actually miss the ludicrousness of Lord’s after that after that expensive Christmas ‘gift’ to a completely pointless person, but, late at night when they eventually return, where will all the ‘gulfies’ go for their late-night fixes now that this shabby shithole of a store has been finally killed off by a combination of coronavirus and its no doubt very greedy landlord?
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