NW9's Colindale has a national aviation museum, a former national newspaper library site and a college campus - and none of them is a shop a customer can wander into.

Colindale

The RAF Museum, the former newspaper library site and a college campus, all within a short walk of Colindale station.

Colindale takes its name from the 16th-century Collin family and was originally called Collin Deep, long before it became known for anything institutional. The Royal Air Force Museum London now stands on part of the former Hendon Aerodrome, and the British Library's newspaper depository building, built in 1902, held the national newspaper reading room from 1934 until the site closed in 2013. Colindale Underground station, on the Northern line's Edgware branch, opened by 1923, and Barnet and Southgate College opened its own Colindale campus in August 2016.

None of that is a shopping parade. Colindale's main shopping street runs along the A5 in NW9, which forms the borough boundary with Brent at this point, and parts of the area have been designated a 'proposed area of intensification' by the Mayor of London, with major regeneration under way since the 2010s. The commercial pattern here is set by institutions and construction rather than a settled row of shopfronts, which is a genuinely different customer base to serve.

That means a business trading near the museum, the college or a new development in Colindale is found almost entirely through search rather than through footfall past a window, and a website that states clearly which of those audiences it serves - museum visitors, students, or people moving into new housing - does real work that a shop sign here cannot.