Putney’s ham shop hangs up its knife after eight years

“Thank You, Putney!” reads the notice taped inside the window of Casa Manolo, the Spanish tapas bar and jamón shop that has closed at 124 Putney High Street after eight years. It directs customers to the chain’s branches in Clapham Junction and the Strand, both still trading, and promises “exciting new projects” to come.

Readers named Casa Manolo a high street hero in our February survey, months before it joined the closures list itself. The chain started on the Strand in 2014, built on family recipes and Iberico ham cured in Guijuelo, Spain, and expanded to Chelsea, Angel, Clapham Junction and Putney. The Putney branch was a hybrid of deli and dining room, hand-carved ham, a wine wall and a small kitchen behind it. Events ran through the year, from a flamenco show to an Iberico ham carving masterclass, and the paella was genuinely excellent.

If you have walked down Putney High Street lately, you will have noticed how many shopfronts stand behind hopeful To Let boards. Casa Manolo’s is one more, but the letting brochure for its old unit is the first time anyone has put a number on why.

Putney is where the chains let go

Casa Manolo is not a one-off. It joins Papa John’s, Subway, Wasabi, Simmons and Be At One, and Starbucks, all multi-site operators that shut their Putney branch while keeping the rest of the chain open. Each had somewhere else to go, and Putney was the branch that lost out. Franco Manca is the honest exception: when the chain closed 16 restaurants nationally in April, Putney and Southfields both survived the cull.

So why does Putney keep drawing the short straw? The letting brochure for Casa Manolo’s old unit gives the first real answer.

The letting brochure that explains it

The letting brochure went up in May, while Casa Manolo was still open and serving customers. It marketed the unit at £80,000 a year. That figure, called the rateable value, is the Valuation Office Agency’s assessment of what a shop could reasonably fetch in rent, in this case the rent it judged the unit would have fetched in April 2024. It is built from evidence of rents actually agreed, and it is what business rates bills are based on. The VOA puts 124 Putney High Street at £58,500, more than a third below what the landlord is asking.

It is not one landlord being greedy. Along the street, 158 Putney High Street is asking £48,000 against an assessed value of £33,750, 42% above. The old corner unit near the station asks £110,000 against £94,000, 17% above. The market for these units simply is not clearing. Our audit in April found eight prominent units standing empty along the High Street while asking prices held steady rather than falling to meet demand.

The VOA’s own numbers back this up. Across the 187 shops we matched in its lists going back to 2017, the street’s total assessed rental value is £10,885,250, statistically unchanged from £10,890,395 nine years earlier. Over the same nine years, general prices rose by a third. Putney High Street’s rents have gone precisely nowhere in cash terms, while everything else got more expensive.

Why the shape was never in its favour

There is a second reason this particular unit struggled, beyond price. Surveyors value shops by frontage, not floor space: the first few metres behind the window carry full value, and everything further back is worth progressively less, a method sometimes called Zone A. A shop that is long and thin loses value fast, because so much of it sits behind that valuable first stretch of window. A long, narrow unit like 124, which read as a deli from the pavement with hams hanging in the window, is structurally cheap space no matter what fills it.

Masala Odyssey, further down the street, had exactly the same problem. Another long, narrow shop that never quite worked from the pavement, it has stood empty since its landlord repossessed it in April.

What’s left, and what’s next

The unit at 124 is available on a new lease immediately, kitchenette and basement included, with terms that would let a wide range of shops, cafes or restaurants move straight in. Someone will get a well-fitted space, if the price finds the market. For now, Clapham Junction and the Strand keep the flamenco nights and the ham carving going, while Putney waits to see what “exciting new projects” means.