Iraqi Grocer’s Eviction Sparks Gentrification Fight in London

Nour Cash & Carry in the Brixton neighborhood of London has the crammed charm of a classic New York bodega, but with a standout food selection that has made it popular with local restaurant chefs.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times
Nour Cash & Carry in the Brixton neighborhood of London has the crammed charm of a classic New York bodega, but with a standout food selection that has made it popular with local restaurant chefs.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times
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Iraqi Grocer’s Eviction Sparks Gentrification Fight in London

Nour Cash & Carry in the Brixton neighborhood of London has the crammed charm of a classic New York bodega, but with a standout food selection that has made it popular with local restaurant chefs.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times
Nour Cash & Carry in the Brixton neighborhood of London has the crammed charm of a classic New York bodega, but with a standout food selection that has made it popular with local restaurant chefs.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Saja Shaheen is walking the aisles of Nour Cash & Carry, explaining the eclectic inventory of the popular grocery store her family has owned inside Brixton Market for more than 20 years. As new immigrant communities arrive in the diverse area of south London, she said, foods are added to match their tastes.

Bags of rice are piled six feet high near the entrance, next to 15-liter jugs of various cooking oils. Spiced plantain chips and eight varieties of jerk sauce are imported from the Caribbean. There are bags of egusi, ground prawns and dried crayfish used for African dishes. Date syrups, tahini and okra cater to Middle Eastern customers.

Nour has the crammed charm of a classic New York bodega, but with a standout food selection that has made it popular with local restaurant chefs. (“It’s Whole Foods without the eye-watering prices, for real people,” said a local blog.) The store is not designed for comfort — or social distancing. Elbowing someone aside to reach a bag of beans or cornmeal is acceptable. There are no discernible checkout lines. The staff is savvy at defusing arguments.

“Some people say they come here for the fight,” said Ms. Shaheen, walking through a spice aisle that stretches toward the ceiling, filled with curry powders, cardamom, nutmeg, paprika and peppercorns (green, red, black, white and pink). “It’s an authentic shop. It doesn’t look fancy. It’s been built organically.”

Nour’s beloved status in Brixton, a vibrant, occasionally chaotic, multicultural hub, made it a shock in January when the Shaheen family received an eviction notice. New landlords, Hondo Enterprises, run by a 39-year-old multimillionaire from Texas who moonlights as a house-music D.J., said the tenants needed to move out by July 22. A new power substation was being built on the premises to provide electricity for other shops in the increasingly upmarket shopping area where Nour is.

When the Shaheen family refused to strike a deal, a gentrification fight began. A group of customers organized to save the store, saying Nour’s fate was a referendum about broader changes in Brixton. And like many such battles — whether in San Francisco, New York or Paris — those being displaced in Brixton are disproportionately lower income and from minority communities, raising issues of race in a country that has long struggled to address the topic head on.

“The shop became emblematic of something more,” said Hiba Ahmad, who helped organize the campaign, called Save Nour. “Everyone has seen this story over and over.”

The Shaheen family is originally from Iraq but was forced out in 1980 by Saddam Hussein’s regime. The family stayed in Iran for a decade before eventually going to London in 1990.

“We thought Europe was heaven,” said Salam Shaheen, Saja’s father, who drives every evening to a London wholesale market to hand-select produce for the store.

The family settled near Brixton, an area with a reputation for welcoming immigrant families. Starting in the 1940s, Brixton was the center of the Windrush Generation, the people who moved from Jamaica and other colonies to help rebuild the country after World War II.

Many welcomed development of Brixton when investors began putting money into the area. The community had long been neglected and developed a rough reputation, particularly after riots in 1981 that were in part a result of racial tensions and aggressive police tactics.

Two glass-covered pedestrian arcades in the center of Brixton, dating from the 1920s and 1930s, became run down and were nearly turned into apartments in 2008. Now a registered heritage site, Brixton Market, including the arcades, is a shopping and nightlife destination, with independent shops, restaurants and bars opening next to older merchants like Nour, fishmongers and butchers.

But locals have watched warily as the change accelerated, fueled by Brixton’s once relatively affordable cost of living, public transportation links, boisterous nightlife, and enviable music, art and food scenes. A mural of David Bowie, who was born in Brixton, is a popular Instagram stop for tourists.

“All the local people, ethnic minorities, are being driven away,” said Folashade Akande, owner of Iya-Ibadan, a store that has sold African food and crafts in the market for more than 20 years. As new shops like the “plant-based cheesemonger” opened nearby, her rents have increased. “I’ll try to stay as long as I can,” she said.

In the Nour campaign, anti-gentrification activists found a seemingly perfect foil in Taylor McWilliams, Hondo’s chief executive. With financial backing from the American hedge fund Angelo Gordon, Mr. McWilliams bought the covered markets in 2018 for more than 37 million pounds, about $46 million today, along with a popular nightclub and another property he plans to convert into a 20-story office building, which would be Brixton’s tallest.

“He’s buying up Brixton,” said Anees Matooq, a Nour customer who is active in the Save Nour group.

Mr. Matooq said a prevailing view was that Mr. McWilliams, who dated an ex-girlfriend of Prince Harry and is a regular on the Ibiza club scene as a D.J. in the house-music group Housekeeping, wanted to make Brixton into an area where he and his friends want to hang out on weekends. For many, he represents what Brixton is not.

Mr. McWilliams said he wasn’t interested in changing Brixton. He wondered why he was cast as the villain, given that he had already spent more than £2 million, or $2.5 million, to fix plumbing problems, refurbish bathrooms and install a heating system that will keep the market busy during winter. He suspended rents for all tenants for three months after the pandemic broke out.

In April, while at home obeying Britain’s lockdown orders, the Save Nour campaigners infiltrated an online charity concert Mr. McWilliams was playing. The activists dressed up as clubgoers until Mr. McWilliams’s set began, when they revealed themselves and began heckling and criticizing him with signs in front of more than a thousand internet onlookers. Suddenly club music websites were writing about the effort to save Nour.

Many in Brixton said the campaigners had a false sense of nostalgia. Ian Riley, a Scotsman who owns a plant and homewares store, Cornercopia, remembers finding dead rats and human feces when he took over a unit in the market more than a decade ago.

Marsha Smith, a local D.J. who grew up going to Nour with her mother, said that while she was frustrated that new shops were tailored more to well-heeled customers, Brixton had gone through different waves of change.

“You’ve got the original yuppies who don’t like the new yuppies,” she said.

In June, facing a drop in sales as a result of the pandemic, the Shaheen family was preparing a court challenge to save Nour. Local celebrities like the chef Yotam Ottolenghi spoke out on the store’s behalf, and more than 55,000 people signed an online petition.

But on June 19, after a flurry of negotiations, a deal was reached. Nour would move to a new location in the market with a slightly lower rent.

“It feels like a big, giant hug,” Ms. Shaheen said at the store the next morning, as customers stopped in to congratulate the family. “It validated us, an immigrant family coming here to this country and not being British.”

The New York Times



Alien Planet Lashed by Huge Flares from its 'Angry Beast' Star

File Photo: An imagined view of the three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth discovered using a specialist telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatoryin Chile. ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger
File Photo: An imagined view of the three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth discovered using a specialist telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatoryin Chile. ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger
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Alien Planet Lashed by Huge Flares from its 'Angry Beast' Star

File Photo: An imagined view of the three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth discovered using a specialist telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatoryin Chile. ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger
File Photo: An imagined view of the three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth discovered using a specialist telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatoryin Chile. ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger

Scientists are tracking a large gas planet experiencing quite a quandary as it orbits extremely close to a young star - a predicament never previously observed.

This exoplanet, as planets beyond our solar system are called, orbits its star so tightly that it appears to trigger flares from the stellar surface - larger than any observed from the sun - reaching several million miles (km) into space that over time may strip much of this unlucky world's atmosphere, Reuters reported.

The phenomenon appears to be caused by the planet's interaction with the star's magnetic field, according to the researchers. And this star is a kind known to flare, especially when young.

"A young star of this type is an angry beast, especially if you're sitting as close up as this planet does," said Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy astrophysicist Ekaterina Ilin, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.

The star, called HIP 67522, is slightly more massive than the sun and is located about 407 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

This star and planet, as well as a second smaller gas planet also detected in this planetary system, are practically newborns. Whereas the sun and our solar system's planets are roughly 4.5 billion years old, this star is about 17 million years old, with its planets slightly younger.

The planet, named HIP 67522 b, has a diameter almost the size of Jupiter, our solar system's largest planet, but with only 5% of Jupiter's mass. That makes it one of the puffiest exoplanets known, with a consistency reminiscent of cotton candy (candy floss).

It orbits five times closer to its star than our solar system's innermost planet Mercury orbits the sun, needing only seven days to complete an orbit.

A flare is an intense eruption of electromagnetic radiation emanating from the outermost part of a star's atmosphere, called the corona. So how does HIP 67522 b elicit huge flares from the star? As it orbits, it apparently interacts with the star's magnetic field - either through its own magnetic field or perhaps through the presence of conducting material such as iron in the planet's composition.

"We don't know for sure what the mechanism is. We think it is plausible that the planet moves within the star's magnetic field and whips up a wave that travels along magnetic field lines to the star. When the wave reaches the stellar corona, it triggers flares in large magnetic field loops that store energy, which is released by the wave," Ilin said.

"As it moves through the field like a boat on a lake, it creates waves in its wake," Ilin added. "The flares these waves trigger when they crash into the star are a new phenomenon. This is important because it had never been observed before, especially at the intensity detected."

The researchers believe it is a specific type of wave called an Alfvén wave, named for 20th century Swedish physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Hannes Alfvén, that propagates due to the interaction of magnetic fields.

The flares may heat up and inflate the planet's atmosphere, which is dominated by hydrogen and helium. Being lashed by these flares could blast away lighter elements from the atmosphere and reduce the planet's mass over perhaps hundreds of millions of years.

"At that time, it will have lost most if not all the light elements, and become what's called a sub-Neptune - a gas planet smaller than Neptune," Ilin said, referring to the smallest of our solar system's gas planets.

The researchers used observations by two space telescopes: NASA's TESS, short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, and the European Space Agency's CHEOPS, short for CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite.

The plight of HIP 67522 b illustrates the many circumstances under which exoplanets exist.

"It is certainly no sheltered youth for this planet. But I am not sad about it. I enjoy diversity in all things nature, and what this planet will eventually become - perhaps a sub-Neptune rich in heavy elements that did not evaporate - is no less fascinating than what we observe today."