City View: Birmingham needs more independent coffee shops
One of the unusual winners in this recession, along with the usual lipstick manufacturers, chocolate bar purveyors and insolvency lawyers, is the humble coffee shop.
Although there have been some high-profile casualties with the downturn sending Coffee Republic into a prepack administration in August and BB Coffee’s folding in October, chains like Starbucks and Costa Coffee have had a remarkably good year, managing to increase their outlets by an astonishing 47 per cent.
By size of town centre, the nation’s coffee capitals are Camden Town in north London (66 outlets), Brighton (121) and Edinburgh town centre (182).
All these places are thronged with tourists so it’s no real surprise that Birmingham’s coffee shop per capita ratio is not quite as high - 81 coffee shops in Birmingham city centre - testament to the fact Birmingham is not (yet) seen as a number one tourism destination.
But what is a real shame is the fact that Birmingham’s independents-to-chain ratio is the lowest in the top ten UK cities, way behind places like Cardiff or Edinburgh.
Birmingham is trying hard to fight off its “clone town” image, but surveys like this just highlight we still have some way to go.
Regeneration experts know that independents, whether they be fashion boutiques or family-run coffee shops, boost local economies not just by being more likely to stock goods made by local suppliers but by attracting people in from outside the area keen to explore a different kind of shopping experience.
Fortunately, independent coffee shops still dominate in Birmingham. Maybe this recognises the fact that cafes have long been community hubs, a status which naturally lends itself to ownership by people who are also part of the community and no matter how hard the chains try to rebrand themselves, they can never quite recreate the feel of a locally-run cafe.
One interesting fact to come out of the survey was that newly-redundant businesspeople keen to get out of the house are using coffee shops with free wifi as make-shift offices from which to launch their next career move.
And changes in the way people work - with more people carrying out their job remotely - mean a local coffee shop with cafe macchiato and cake on tap can be a far more enticing workplace than sitting at the kitchen table trying to ignore the washing up piling up in the sink.
Increasingly independents are cottoning on to this kind of user - here in The Birmingham Post we’ve been following Cafelicious in Rubery as it embarks on its “digital adventure” to entice exactly this sort of customer.
Coffee shops diversifying is nothing new - the London Stock Exchange and Lloyds of London after all had their roots in coffee shops - so who knows what the next generation of coffee shops will become?
And with a bit of forward-thinking, independently-owned coffee shops will have the flexibility to look beyond the cappuccino to find new ways of bringing people together profitably.
