No place for dairy among posh shops

The Patel family's 33-year-old dairy in Newmarket will be demolished to make way for a shopping development.

Newmarket's 33-year-old dairy and fruit shop has been swept aside by redevelopment in the swank Auckland shopping strip.

Ramu Patel opened the shop in 1972 and its metal roller-door onto Broadway clanged shut for the last time on Sunday to help make way for a block of up to seven new stores.

Gone are the boxes of bananas and buckets of flowers once stacked on the footpath. Customers would stock up before hopping on a bus at the stop outside.

"We are very sad. It's a historical place for me," 66-year-old Mr Patel, of Epsom, said yesterday.

The oldest of the buildings to be demolished from today, which housed stores including a book shop and a toy shop, dates from the 1930s.

The site, opposite the 277 shopping mall, extends from an old Munns menswear shop to the Shoe Sheriff footwear repair shop, which will remain.

Tim Dromgool, a director of the company behind the redevelopment, Nuffield Lane, said the site needed revitalisation.

The land-owner, Tram Lease, has in the past gone further, with property manager Peter Snelling saying: "That whole section of Broadway is run down and a blot on the Broadway landscape and in desperate need of redevelopment in keeping with the surroundings."

Nuffield is still deciding what to build on the vacant site on the other side of the shoe repair shop.

Shoe Sheriff owner Peter Croad said his shop would be left "like Stuart Little's house" - the old building between new ones in the children's movie about an adopted mouse in New York.

He estimated the building dated from the early 1930s. Its shop-front started life as a Ford car showroom, with the basement at the rear used as a workshop.

The Croads defeated Tram in court in 2003 over a wall supporting their shop's roof, which was then mostly outside the shop's boundary and which Tram had wanted to knock down.

Mr Patel lamented the closure of fresh food shops such as his dairy in the face of rising rents and competition from supermarkets.

When he opened his shop the rent was $50 a week. Before it closed, he was paying $1000.

An immigrant from Britain and originally from India, Mr Patel had expanded the shop over the years and lived out the back with his family for a time. His wife, Kusum, and their five children had all helped out in the shop.

He said bananas had remained his customers' most popular purchase, but vegetable sales declined.

Mr Patel would like to reopen his shop in Newmarket or a surrounding area, but said he was still exploring options.

The demolition is expected to take less than three weeks.