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On Retail Insider’s visit, sales staff revealed that the most popular items at the moment were the streaked-orange-and-red blood oranges from Sicily which benefit from its mild winter climate for a high sugar content, and the green-and-orange striped winter tomatoes, also from Italy. There is more diversity and time for UK-located small-batch growers to supply their local high street green grocers but those shops do not have the ability to sell usually in any more than one high street and will not be able to get their hands on produce direct from suppliers that are not in the UK. It does have a European-wide network of specialist growers which means that at a price you can buy your heritage tomatoes in exactly their right season and supplied by small growers whose ethical standards can be traced. It may be that neither most supermarkets nor green grocers will ever look like a Natoora store but there is no denying that its bold embodiment of a totally new way of thinking about seasonality, heritage and supply is attractive to consumers and restaurants alike.

: I’ll now take you to a place where you can do your normal recycling and then take the things that you know have the potential to have a careful second owner to be assessed at another part of the same site. Go on: From there, if it makes the grade, it is then passed on to the relevant units within a mall of shops, also on-site, which does a second sort out and finally upcycles, repaints, repairs and ultimately hopefully resells. Local councillors in Eskilstuna had the idea in 2014, it actually opened in 2015, and by 2017 the mall was already recording sales of SEK 10million which is just under £900k. They have a municipal company called Eskilstuna Energi och Miljo (EEM), which is basically charged with creating commercially viable, environmental initiatives while simultaneously being a role model in relation to energy and sustainability.

There are many other examples of such calamities and there will no doubt be many more because one of the toughest things in business is for managements to disrupt their successful businesses by introducing a new way of working. The potentially disruptive Built sits alongside the core Travis Perkins stores and no doubt provides a pointer to the future for the group and how it will likely need to inflict change on its existing model. There is much uncertainty about how the economics of these moves will stack-up but like many other retailers today there is growing realisation that they must disrupt themselves in order to position their organisations to better cater for the changing consumption habits of shoppers. Our solutions drive more than 800 international retail brands from Charles Tyrwhitt and The White Company to Ryman and Sue Ryder, Hobbycraft, Wasabi and Ted Baker, K3 Retail is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and the UK’s leading Microsoft Dynamics retail partner.

Six months ago, we surveyed two different high streets: Crouch End Broadway and Wood Green High Road both in the borough of Haringey, North London, to see in what ways they differ and what the emergence of the Wood Green Business Improvement District (BID) might mean for the fortunes of struggling Wood Green. In separate developments, Wood Green Works – a large co-working space – has just opened to attract new entrepreneurs and SMEs to the area while a huge housing development, Clarendon Park, which will eventually deliver 1,500 new homes in the area is now underway giving the area a welcome and large influx of potential shoppers/diners/cinema goers in the next few years. Additionally the Business Watch scheme which allows quick transferring of information and images of incidents and individuals between the retailers on the High Road is now in use and a street radio initiative began to roll-out in mid-March. Crouch End also has several housing developments happening in the near future including the refurbishment of the Hornsey Town Hall which is to be turned into a hotel, 135 flats and an arts centre. While Crouch End by virtue of its isolation from tube stations and local population will always have a laid back, family vibe to its shopping, the retailers on the High Road could usefully instead dial up a vibrant ethical/youthful atmosphere as encapsulated in Blue House Yard to maximise its difference.