The store’s change of direction since Covid speaks volumes about the way we live now
On a grey Monday lunchtime in June, the scene inside a south-east London branch of Pret doesn’t feel particularly revolutionary. A mother wheels a buggy in past a badly parked electric bike and settles down to feed her newborn. At the counter, an older man unfolds a plastic M&S bag and loads it with a tuna baguette and a bottle of orange juice.
At one of the tables, a woman called Nicole is “working from home” for a City firm. She only commutes into the office two days a week. “I don’t even want to tell you how often I used to pop into the Pret downstairs from my office,” she says, a laptop and an empty coffee cup in front of her. “When this place opened last year, I was straight in. In a weird way it felt like coming home.”
This branch of Pret, in the affluent suburb of East Dulwich, replaced an old William Hill betting shop; it is one of more than 40 new stores the chain has opened in the UK in the past year, mostly in places it would not previously have waved a cucumber at: Bishops Stortford, Reigate, Leicester, Stratford-upon-Avon.
Almost four decades after the first Pret opened in north London – and three years after the chain faced an existential crisis when the coronavirus pandemic emptied the offices that were its bloodline – it is experiencing a massive expansion.