A personal trainer working off Parliament Hill has no shopfront. Their website is the only fixed address they have.

Gospel Oak

Honestly, almost no shopping street - and a station that started under a different name entirely.

Gospel Oak station opened in 1860 under the name Kentish Town, and was only renamed Gospel Oak in 1867 - a reminder that the area's own identity has always sat a little uneasily between its better-known neighbours. Today it sits between Hampstead to the north-west, Dartmouth Park to the north-east, Kentish Town to the south-east and Belsize Park to the south-west, and it has almost no retail of its own. The one exception is a small pocket of shops on Mansfield Road, inside the Mansfield Conservation Area bounded by Roderick, Savernake and Mansfield Roads - a pocket, not a parade, and a website should not describe it as more than that.

What it does have is the Heath itself. Parliament Hill Lido, reached through the Gospel Oak entrance, is a Grade II listed outdoor pool built in 1937, and the athletics track sits alongside it. Between the Lido, the track and the open Heath, a genuine cluster of outdoor-facing and leisure trades - personal trainers, coaches, dog walkers - works the grass and the poolside rather than a shopfront on Mansfield Road or anywhere else.

For them, and for the therapists, tutors and tradespeople covering the surrounding estates from home, there is no passing trade to rely on and often no premises to photograph the outside of. A customer deciding whether to book a session on the Heath or let a tradesperson into their home makes that decision entirely on a screen, which makes an honest, specific website - real photographs, a plain description of where you actually work, a way to book in seconds - do the job a shopfront would otherwise do.