Taking stock at Dandelion Blue

"A guy works all day, he don't want to look at his plate and ask, "What the fuck is this?" He wants to look at his plate, see a steak, and say "I like steak!""
-Pascal, Big Night

Even since it closed three months ago, Dandelion Blue remains considerably cheerier than many of the shops in Brockley that claim to be open for business.

Its unshuttered, untroubled windows expose as a fallacy the idea that shops need heavy steel shutters to protect them from vandals and thieves. Its stacks of jars and bottles still look tempting whenever we walk past and its powder blue, zinc and wood stylings are what we wish our kitchen looked like.

If it were never to reopen, we should preserve it as the museum of gentrification and a monument to the optimism of 2007. However, the signs are that it's about to spring back to life, which is further good news for Coulgate Street, following the recent confirmation that both the common and the station will be drastically improved in the coming months.

A number of readers have seen stock taking going on and Tyrwhitt Ali writes here that:

The staff were doing a stock take today and the "for sale" sign has gone. A judicious bit of earwigging tells me that the new owner intends to "run it pretty much as before".
We hope we'll hear from the new owners soon.