My local, The Winchester pub, is being transformed into luxury flats

A property company plans to flog the upper floors for millions, but downstairs is protected because it is Grade II-listed

Illustration by Ping Zhu

The red route at the top of my road never sits still for a moment. I'm not talking about the traffic, which sometimes sits still for a while, but about the shops on the parade, which come and go with bewildering speed. Since I last wrote on this subject a couple of months ago, the Italian restaurant (sleek, bright, shiny) that replaced the Italian restaurant we all loved (tiny, dark, shabby) has itself closed. It lasted barely a year. They must have spent enough to bribe a Fifa official doing it up, and the food was delicious, but no one ever went.

In fact, so disastrous is this stretch of road for any aspiring retail outlet that even the estate agent on the corner went out of business. The notice went up in the window. The slick young men in pinstripes were put into storage. The PA with the magnificent nose found other and, one hopes, more congenial employment. The post piled up in the doorway. How much of it was made up of mailshots from other estate agents? One day someone came in and started redecorating. Walls were whitewashed, floorboards were planed and polished. The shop still lay empty, but now it was gleaming with potential and Mr Sheen. Then, a couple of weeks ago, some new estate agents moved in. New slick young men in pinstripes are sitting at brand new desks, shouting down phones, possibly at their own answering machines.

The real absence we feel is the pub. The Winchester, for it is really called that, closed last year, after its owners, Pat and Val, sold up and went back to live in Ireland with a large pile of money. At the farewell party, Pat was smiling for the first time in a quarter-century. Running that pub must have been back-breaking, because it was titanic, with many floors. They had sold it to a property company, which proceeded to transform the upper floors into luxury flats, presumably to be flogged for millions to foreign criminals for money-laundering purposes.

But the pub itself cannot be turned into anything that isn't a pub, because it has Grade II-listed glasswork behind the bar. The company ran the pub for a while, but it was empty and shabby and the heart had gone out of it. They shut it a year ago for refurbishment, which hasn't happened.

We didn't really expect anything else. I have yet to encounter anyone who works in property who thinks of anything other than themselves and their own enrichment. In the summer a sign went up in the window saying that the pub would reopen in November. We rejoiced! I have missed those slightly metallic pints of Fosters I used to neck in there of an early evening. And here we are in November and it's still a building site, with a notable absence of builders. Now, of course, we realise they never said which November.

Some of the older drinkers are wondering whether they will live long enough to sit at that magnificent bar again. It was a great favourite of the elderly and the infirm. One or two of them actually died there. Maybe they were waiting to get served. We're patient, here in north London, but we're not that patient.