Who Actually Runs the Mile: Four Women Building Businesses on Belgrave Road

Belgrave Road is usually described in nouns: lights, sweets, saris, spice. Rarely in people. And yet walk the Mile on a Tuesday morning and you will notice something — behind a good number of those counters, in the kitchens and at the back-room desks, the person making the decisions is a woman. Often she is the one who started the business. Increasingly, she is also the one taking it online.

We spent a week on the road talking to four of them. These are their stories, lightly edited, with the practical bits left in so you can go and support them.

Hina, mithai counter, near the Gandhi statue

Hina Vora took over the family sweet shop in 2018 after eleven years as a pharmacy technician at the Royal Infirmary. Her father-in-law had run the counter since the early 1990s, when much of the Mile's Asian business community was still settling in after arriving from East Africa.

"He wanted to retire, and none of the sons wanted it," she says. "Everyone said, it's a lot of hours. It is a lot of hours. But I knew the customers already, and I knew what a bad barfi tastes like."

The shop opens at eight and closes at eight, six days a week, with a single day off on a Monday. Hina's changes have been small and deliberate: a sugar-free range that now accounts for roughly a fifth of sales, better labelling for people with nut allergies, and a steady trade in corporate Diwali boxes that she packs herself into the evening.

"The biggest difference isn't the sweets," she says. "It's the order size. Twenty years ago a family bought half a kilo for a wedding. Now a company in Birmingham orders two hundred boxes and wants them on a Thursday."

What to buy: the mixed 250g box, and anything that comes out of the fryer between three and five in the afternoon. When to go: weekday mornings, when she has time to talk you through the trays.

Simran, fabric and suit shop, mid-Mile

Simran Kaur Sandhu is 29 and represents the second generation — born in Leicester, educated at a comprehensive in Belgrave, and now running the shop her mother opened in 2004 with a loan from a women's credit union.

"Mum sold suits to aunties who came in with three daughters and a wedding to plan," she says. "I sell the same thing to their daughters over Instagram, and to a woman in Belfast who has never been to Leicester."

The lockdown years pushed the business online almost by accident — a phone camera, a ring light and a lot of reels of fabric being unrolled. It now ships across the UK, and around a third of sales never come through the door at all.

What has not changed, she argues, is the reason people still come to the Mile rather than buying blind from a warehouse. "You can feel the fabric. You can put the dupatta against your face and see if it's scratchy. That's the whole business, and you can't download it."

What to buy: unstitched suit fabric, which she will have tailored locally and turned round in about ten days. When to go: weekday afternoons, and message ahead if you want a fitting room to yourself.

Nasreen, tiffin kitchen, off the main road

Nasreen Sheikh runs a dabba service from a small commercial kitchen two streets back from Belgrave Road. Forty to sixty boxes a day, dropped off to students, shift workers, new parents and older residents who no longer cook for themselves.

She started in 2016 with eight boxes for nurses at the hospital. "I was cooking for my family anyway," she says. "I thought, if I'm standing at the stove, I might as well stand there for a few more."

The service is deliberately unglamorous: a fixed weekly menu, two sizes, delivery before six in the evening, no app. Orders come by WhatsApp and are paid monthly. Her regulars, she says, are not the people the guidebooks imagine.

"Everyone thinks the Golden Mile is all families cooking every night. Half my customers are single people working shifts who want dal and rotli and not a takeaway."

How to support: order a trial week rather than a single box, and give her a week's notice if you have allergies. She does not do same-day.

Meera, community room behind a former sari shop

Meera Doshi spent twenty years in local government before converting the back of a disused sari shop into a room with eight tables, a kettle and a noticeboard. It is part café, part classroom, part living room.

On Tuesdays there is an English conversation group for women who have recently arrived in the city. On Thursdays, a knitting and sewing circle. Once a month, a henna evening that fills the room to the door. The chai is £1.50 and nobody is turned away for not buying one.

"The Mile has plenty of places to eat," she says. "What it didn't have was somewhere to sit without spending £15 and without a waiter hovering."

Her request to visitors is simple and slightly pointed. "Come in, sit down, and don't treat the road like a photograph. Ask somebody's name. Ask what they recommend. That is the difference between a visitor and a tourist."

When to go: Tuesday mornings for conversation group, Thursday afternoons for the sewing circle. Both are free; the kettle is not, so buy a chai.

What has changed on Belgrave Road

Ask all four women the same question and the answers overlap. Rents have risen, particularly on the busiest stretch. Parking charges and loading restrictions have made deliveries harder and pushed some trade online. The festival weeks are bigger than ever and the ordinary weeks are quieter, with younger shoppers buying from their sofas rather than the pavement.

But nobody talks about decline. The empty units tend to fill — a gym here, a chai café there, an estate agent that nobody remembers opening. The Mile has been reinventing itself since the 1970s, when the first shops opened to serve a community that had just arrived from Uganda and Kenya with very little. It is not a museum piece; it is a working high street, and it changes the way working high streets do.

How to spend well on the Mile

• Buy something small. A £3 box of sweets or a £1.50 chai is what keeps a counter open on a wet Wednesday.
• Ask before you photograph. Shopfronts, yes. People and their children, ask.
• Pay in cash where you can. Several of these businesses still have card minimums, and cash is quicker at a busy counter.
• Order ahead for festivals. Diwali, Eid and wedding season bookings fill up weeks in advance; a phone call in September beats a queue in November.
• Leave a review that names the shop and the owner. It does more for an independent than a hundred hearts on a photo of the lights.