On recent change
September last year brought with it the end of the Ouseburn shop. So much had changed preceeding that time and I had played with the idea for long enough to know that closing the shop was the right thing to do.
Sometimes people would walk in and say, “Oh this is the dream, the dream!” Doing and thinking exactly the same as I did many years ago whilst looking at flower shops in San Francisco, in London, in Amsterdam.
In the mid 2000s I had finished university in London and was living in San Francisco, rudderless. I walked into one of the many beautiful flower shops in the city (this one was near Castro) and asked if they had any job vacancies. The man in charge asked, “Are you a florist?” “No”, I replied. “Well I don’t have the time or money to train you honey” he said, not very kindly.
This is funny in hindsight (I didn’t laugh at the time). I can remember his face as he said it and I appreciate his point, I do try to be kinder though.
Running a shop is fun. You meet people, make connections, hear gossip, find out where is good to eat, good to drink, what is good to listen to, what is good to see. My father lived a life running shops and I can understand why he loved it (he sold clothes from the 1960s until the 1990s in Newcastle). He built a world for people to experience new sights, colours, fabrics and styles. A unique atmosphere characterized not only by what he sold but by the music playing, the art on the walls and the objects in the window displays.
A customer (a jazz musician), noticed Alice Coltrane playing in my shop and had noted my name on an email regarding an order. It turns out that as a student in Newcastle, Rod would save up and buy his clothes from my dad’s shop and talk to him about music and clothes. And there we were a few decades later, talking about jazz whilst he ordered flowers for his partner (another great customer). That was what I loved about the shop.
So now I find myself in a liminal state. Not everyone knows the shop has closed and is now my studio so they wander in and say, “Oh, have you sold out of plants? It’s so empty in here”. I still get a thrill out of the empty space. It feels like anything is possible.
Last year I became so disenchanted with it all. The spiralling costs, the bills, the VAT, the whispered (or not so whispered) conversations in the shop, “That’s expensive, Homebase is cheaper”. I don’t need to tell you what happened to Homebase.
There were moments when I thought, let’s burn this whole thing to the ground. I can’t imagine the future while it still exists. Thankfully Paddy was there to point out the potentially high administrative effort involved in taking this course of action so it was shelved and I’m allowing myself time to make the changes.
“It’s a process”, I say to people. When they ask questions that I haven’t worked out the answers to yet.
My plan is to carry all of the best parts of the shop forward in this new iteration. Everyone loves the experience of a flower shop but people don’t really buy flowers in that way now. What I do know is that people love the experience of flowers: seeing them, touching them, smelling them, and just being around them. Flowers are a luxury, I can’t sell you tulips for less money than a supermarket will, but that was never really the point anyway.