For more than four decades, the Patel family has kept the doors of its Londis store open – but the latest generation is giving the traditional neighbourhood shop a distinctly modern twist.
The Fountayne Road Londis store has been in the family since 1986 and is now being run across three generations by Alpesh, Priyesh, Neelam, Anjana and Mayank. For Alpesh, the store’s longevity is rooted in something that has remained constant even as retail has changed: its sense of community and its ability to offer customers something they cannot find everywhere else.
One of its most distinctive propositions is also one of its most personal. The store makes homemade Gujarati food in-house, with dishes prepared by the family and sold in the shop every Tuesday and Friday. It is an offer that connects the store directly to its heritage while giving customers a reason to visit beyond the conventional convenience range.
That idea of putting personality into the proposition has increasingly moved beyond the shop itself. In recent years, the family has built what it describes as a “massive” social media platform, using it to create collaborations with brands and businesses including Dishoom and Selfridges.
For a store operating from under 500 sq ft, the ambition is clearly not confined by its physical footprint.
The family has also diversified into supper clubs, working with local bakeries and wine clubs to showcase its mother’s Gujarati food. Rather than treating the shop simply as a place where food is sold, Alpesh and the wider family are using it as a platform to introduce their food to a broader audience and create experiences around it.
That approach is also shaping the next stage of the business. The family plans to welcome chefs and cooks into the shop, allowing them to bring their own food into the store’s food-to-go format.
It is a significant evolution for a business that has survived three generations. Each generation, Alpesh says, has pushed to keep the shop alive by combining the sense of community that has sustained it for 40-plus years with new and distinctive offerings.
For the next generation, that inheritance is less about preserving the store exactly as it was and more about understanding what made it matter in the first place – then finding new ways to make it relevant.
The business remains a single-store C-store with a liquor licence, situated in a town suburb and trading under the Londis fascia. But its proposition increasingly stretches beyond the conventional boundaries of a convenience shop: homemade Gujarati food, social media, collaborations, supper clubs, wine clubs and an emerging food-to-go platform all sit alongside the core retail business.
That blend of family heritage and experimentation is what defines Alpesh’s approach. After 40-plus years, the Patel family shop is still evolving – only now, the next generation is using the shop as much as a stage as a store.