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Hilary Clarke in London
Published: 7:00am, 18 Jun, 2020
Concern is growing that London’s Chinatown, the best known and largest in Europe and one of the city’s major tourist attractions, may not survive the tailwinds of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Although most of the hospitality and catering sector has been hit, with the UK economy shrinking by 20 per cent in April alone, a number of factors specific to Chinatown will make it even harder for the businesses of the area to recover.
“Unless there is a vaccine or a cure I don’t think Chinatown will recover for a long time,” said Hong Kong-born Wing Poon, manager of Tao Tao Ju Cantonese restaurant in Lisle Street.
Like many other Chinatown restaurants, it shut its doors more than a week before the lockdown that started on March 23, as business slumped.
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Throughout lockdown, Chinatown has seemed like a ghost town, the two Chinese gateways opening onto eerily empty paved streets, with most of the restaurants boarded up. Lunar New Year banners and lanterns, still strung across the district’s epicentre of Gerard Street and Newport Place, are a reminder of more joyous celebrations that took place just before lockdown.
Although restaurants have been allowed to open for takeaways, only a handful have done so, serving food from tables that block entrances. A couple of the Chinese bakeries have opened, but business has not been brisk, as most of the customers don’t live locally.
A few more are converting after the government allowed retail shops to begin trading on Monday.
But the main footfall in Chinatown is not from West End shops, but from nearby theatreland which is unlikely to return for many months.
A surge in Sinophobia triggered by the pandemic is also adding to concerns that even when shutters of Chinatown’s restaurants do come up, fearful customers will not return to the area that has been the heart of the UK’s Chinese community since the 1950s.
Finally, the thousands of Chinese students that studied in London who came to the district to eat and shop for food are also not likely to return in September, even if universities and colleges reopen.
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Edmond Yeo, chairperson of the Chinese Information and Advice Centre, said there has been a huge surge in unemployment, domestic violence and mental health crises as workers wonder how they are going to feed and educate their families. From its tiny offices in a basement in Chinatown, the organisation has been supplying masks and advice to those most in need.
“No one knows what is going to happen.”
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