Telegraph Magazine Shop Awards 2010: Independent Streak

3:19PM BST 07 Oct 2010

For one thing, I don't take for granted. That feeling when you opened the door and enter a shop, and production exquisitelylaid is of the highest quality and shopkeepers who knows his things, completely is priceless.
This is the British street was once famous age before, market sale chained supermarkets and online shopping. Thankfully, if you very carefully, it still exists - in our small independent stores, those local hero pepper retailer of landscape.
Independent stores are part of the heritage. Innovation, quality, entrepreneurship is British traits - you only have to look at the fashion designer we produce in surprising to see that. We are not about great international brands - leave it with the United States and China -- but the owner of the kingdom of cliche is true.
True, but increasingly facing big companies, the Internet and the fragile global economy. Losing our brilliant one-time retailers will is a national tragedy.
If we want to protect our streets become dull, identikit versions of each other, or dying off completely (it is happening already), then we have to rally in our small independent legislators, not only to those in your custom but very life.

Thousands of readers vote in last year's telegraph magazine store award, our most successful? This is an opportunity we greet our favorite, the nation's retailers (perhaps unsurprisingly, and deservedly, John lewis and marks and spencer above shops out). But the unexpected hero last year's winners receive our three separate categories: folk boutiques in London (which I have given my love for its exquisite taste), Origin8, delicafein Cambridge, big blue sky, shops in north signatures - next - the - Sea internal extending outward.
They all survived the recession and their customers to develop close contact with their vote (they) repay, provide some big boys cannot: a unique and individual service.
So for this year's awards, we have changed the focus, the first time the prize is devoted entirely to the independent stores - the best small shops in Britain, I want you to help me to celebrate their special place on the high street.
The passage in the annual awards, relationship with my recent series, the British broadcasting corporation (BBC) of shops, queen Mary, I went to six struggling throughout the country for an independent store trying to restore their wealth to help small shopkeepers successful once.
In every store I want to emphasize oneself specialization and keep their uniqueness, but let them more related is meaningless, people used to think how to succeed in the shop; Now you must consider how to change the consumption, real march. So I in the greengrocer Wirral help, merseyside, these three sisterswho have it now able to tell their customers: "we want to do home delivery, we will have the most fresh stock, we will with professional knowledge competition, we will price."
Similarly, Dazzle and Denny, the owners of a once-struggling interiors shop in Kingston-upon-Thames, are now able to say, ‘We can source furniture you cannot get anywhere else, and we can make it bespoke.’

What I wanted most was for the shopkeepers I visited to prove to their customers that they were true experts in their field, and that people who walked into their shops would learn something, even if they didn’t buy anything. That kind ofspecialist knowledge, in an age of internet shopping and big chain stores, is increasingly precious.
In my Telegraph Magazine Shop! column of July 3 I wrote about a shoe shop called AK & G Martin-Stone, which was a 10-minute walk from my house. I loved it. It was where I bought my son Mylo’s first proper men’s shoes when he hit 16 andwhere I went when I broke the strap off a beautiful pair of Yves Saint Laurent summer sandals. YSL couldn’t fix them, but this shop could.