A City Changing

Bram Teuling had been a cobbler on Fenner Row for thirty-four years, which meant that he measured the street not in decades but in soles. The postman's boots came twice a year. The woman from the surgery brought the same green shoes each autumn and had done so since her children were small.

The changes had been incremental, which is how a street changes without anyone noticing that it has. The ironmonger went first, then the launderette, then the shop that had sold wool and, latterly, nothing anyone could name. Each closure had looked, at the time, like a single piece of bad luck.

In March the scaffolding arrived. It went up over the three empty premises opposite, and a hoarding was bolted across their doorways, printed with a drawing of the street as it would look afterwards: wider pavements, young trees, people carrying coffee at an angle no real person achieves.

Bram studied the drawing for some time and concluded that his own shopfront had been left out of it, not deliberately, he thought, but because a workshop with a faded awning and a window of unclaimed shoes does not improve a picture of the future.

What the hoarding called refurbishment his neighbour Silke called, more plainly, the end of the cheap rents. She had opened a plant shop next door in January, at a rent that made Bram put down his cup, and she was neither apologetic about it nor especially confident.

"You've got the long lease," she said. "Everyone says so. The cobbler will outlive all of us." Bram said that his tenancy was not long, exactly, but had simply been renewed so many times that nobody at the agency remembered how it had started.

He was obstinate about this. Rent was a thing that arrived, like weather. For thirty-four years he had paid it on the second Monday of the month, in person, and for thirty-four years the amount had risen so gently that he had never once had to think about it as a number.

The renewal came in June, in an envelope with a window. The new figure was not cruel. It was simply the figure of a different street, arrived early, and it assumed a footfall that Fenner Row would not have until the scaffolding came down, if it came at all.

He did his arithmetic on the back of a repair ticket. Sixty pairs a week would cover it. He was doing thirty-one, and had been doing roughly thirty-one since the launderette closed and people stopped having a second reason to walk down this end of the road.

Silke's question, when it came, was not the one he had been bracing for. She did not ask whether he could pay. She asked who was going to do this when he stopped, and whether he had ever thought of taking somebody on.

He had not, in thirty-four years, thought of it once. An apprentice meant a wage, a bench, insurance and the admission that the work would go on after him. He told her the trade was finished, that nobody mends anything now, and heard, as he said it, how much it sounded like dereliction rather than realism.

In August he cleared the window of the shoes nobody had claimed since 2019, painted the frame, and had a card made for the new hoarding, which the site manager allowed on the grounds that it filled an ugly gap. Repairs while you wait. Fourth door past the scaffolding.

By October he was doing forty-four pairs a week, most of them from people who had walked past for years without registering that the workshop was open. In November he took on a nineteen-year-old called Toma, who was slow, careful and unembarrassed by the smell of glue.

The street is still not the street on the hoarding, and Bram does not expect to like it when it is. But he has signed for another five years, and when Toma asks him how long a good sole should last, he answers with a number that reaches well past his own retirement.