By Alfie Linville-Sibley
Nestled between Silver Street and Cank Street, you’d be forgiven for walking past the Silver Arcade without a second thought. The three-headed, four-storey sentinel has stood guard at the foot of Silver Street for over a century, watching Leicester centre change around it. Now in its twelfth decade, the arcade is lumbering back into life.
Had you ventured into the arcade a few years ago and craned your neck up to the lofty skylights there would be scant signs of life, save for the ground floor where longtime residents Bryter Moon Deli and Crystal Hair and Beauty call home. Take a glance up today and you might think you had fallen back in time – sans the grungy aesthetics.
“We’re at the beginning of something; it feels like a revival,” said Josh Ptohopoulos, owner of vintage clothing store Above Ground.
New boutique shops now speckle the second and third floors of the arcade, inviting punters into the airy, almost Scandinavian-inspired retail spaces. Gone is the feeling that this is a vacuum-packed bazaar with barely room to breathe, now it abounds with natural light, open spaces and wooden tactility.
Josh, 37, moved into the arcade last year from the nearby Royal Arcade. Ruminating on the arcade’s past and future, Josh sees a larger cycle at play: “Music, clothing, games, anything like that has a pattern, it repeats, our shops are different from ones in the past, but it’s the same sort of things being sold as 20 years ago.
“It wants to be a destination again.”
In its 90s heyday, the Silver Arcade played host to a new generation of culture for the city, a ‘vertical market’ ripe for exploration. Wellgosh started life on the top floor of the arcade, selling streetwear from all corners of the globe, alongside Tinfish and Kazbah, dealing in footwear and body mods, respectively.
“The sheer number of independent shops was stifling in the best way possible,” said Nathaniel Newell, a former Wellgosh employee.
Like an overstuffed suitcase bursting at the seams, shops were piled in cheek to jowl, slinging music, clothing and sneakers, alongside anything else you could want.
“You could buy a record, buy your clothes and get your drugs all at once,” mused Josh. Illicit substances aside, that rings as true now as it was then. The names on doors might have changed but the cultural cachet on offer is the life blood of the arcade again.
