This was the question that was regularly asked by Moseley shoppers until early this Monday morning. The shocking news that local fishmonger and pricey pear retailer, Peter Vincent, was shutting his doors for the very last time, spread through Moseley like the smell of bad fish. It appears that the plan to develop the “Eastside” of downtown Moseley into a luxurious shopping paradise did not sit well with the traditionalist Mr Vincent.
The plans that will turn the area next to Kwik Save into an apparently much needed supermarket, meant that Mr Vincent would have had to pack his fishy bags and temporarily move over the road. This appears to be yet another example of Moseley’s mental planning policy. The new rules, which appear to prevent non estate agents opening premises whilst simultaneously pushing existing businesses towards closure, have been the envy of more prosperous areas of Birmingham for a number of years.
Areas such as Harborne, which has a thriving shopping area, have been looking high and low for such a solution. A local councillor from Harborne who surprisingly wished to remain nameless told us, “We’ve been jealous of Moseley for quite some time. When you come to Harborne all you see is busy shops and bustling pubs and all of them are pumping gratuitous amounts of cash into the local economy. What we need is a coherent, long-term plan to get some of these businesses shut down and more estate agents open. It’s economic common sense really, when a green grocer sells an apple, he makes a tiny profit, when an estate agent sells a house, they make a massive profit. That’s what we need massive profit and less people.”
All this local policy nonsense doesn’t exactly help the people of Moseley though. It is now estimated that local residents must now travel as far as two miles to the Birmingham indoor markets in order to purchase fish. Alright, we do accept that the fish costs about a third of what Mr Vincent charged but this isn’t really the point.
Lovers of fishy smells need not worry too much though, as there is still a large supply of rotting fish next to the Atlantis Kebab Superstore.