The building still holds prominence on Hamlet Court Road, a street which, while remaining home to a handful of clothing boutiques and independent traders, has seen countless other stores come and go in that time. Seemingly never more so than now, for the “death of the high street” is a countywide contagion, and the closure of Haven’s is particularly symptomatic.
It could also be diagnosed as the local Southend-on-Sea strain, whereby rising crime rates have deterred people from the high street. Shops are emptying, emptying, and emptying still. Cheap clothing and mobile phone cases appear in their place, only to empty again, replaced by more.
Havens have put their closure down to at least one named symptom: everyone does their shopping online now. On the other hand, however, their store was also a hallmark of “how things were”; receipts written by hand, metric conversions made via small leather notebooks, selections of marzipan and cherries scooped into presentation boxes and weighed by staff themselves. It’s a testament to these comparatively slower processes, but also a wonder, that they remained open as long as they did.
In this way Havens survived on the novelty in its very experience, and associations which could be described as sentimental. Emma Mills tells me that she would come here as a child, accompanying her father to buy something “really special” for her mother at Christmas.