Incense sticks and Imperial Leather soap. Fresh ginger, dried chillies and cassava chips. Gugal ("For religious purposes. Do not consume") and Krackjack ("The world's first sweet and salty biscuit"). Welcome to PJ Grocers in Walsall - half corner shop, half Aladdin's cave of spices, household utensils and deservedly obscure brand names. Paresh Modi has been PJ's larger-than-life proprietor - with his wife, Prabha - for 22 years, and shopkeeping has been in his family since the Mogul era. "But in Rajasthan, they were turning Hindus into Muslims," he says, as if it were yesterday, "so we moved out of there."
Paresh will tell you about every delicacy on every shelf: "knowledge accumulated over generations," he says, not without a self-promotional flourish. Contrast this with the supermarkets that are driving Paresh and co to the wall: "If you ask them about rice," he says, wrinkling his nose, "they'll tell you what aisle it's in. But they won't tell you what type it is, and what that means." British corner shops are currently closing at a rate of 2,000 per year, and Paresh can't persuade his sons to maintain the family tradition. "One wants to be an accountant, the other a teacher. It's a shame. It's the end of an era."
Paresh's story now forms part of a site-specific theatre piece, The Corner Shop, which weaves together testimonies from shopkeepers, their families and customers, and stages them in an abandoned shop unit in Queen's Square shopping centre in Sandwell, West Bromwich. The show is by Foursight Theatre, who usually specialise in telling stories from a women's perspective; their last production was Thatcher the Musical! (spot the grocery connection). It is part-funded by the English Heritage Lottery Fund, which will allow its stories, culled from community interviews, to be preserved in a touring oral history exhibition in 2009. But the fund also raised the gloomy possibility, says co-director Steve Johnstone, that the show might be construed as "a living museum". "I shouldn't say this," he says, "but when we were filling out the form, we tried to make the show sound un-theatrical, just so we could get the money."
But there's nothing museum-like about the activity in the ex-furniture warehouse where this show is being built and rehearsed. Foursight's design team have constructed a shopkeeping fantasia, through which audiences will promenade. There's a Willy Wonka-style sweetshop, a shop from Mogul times, an Afro-Caribbean stall, and enough multicoloured, ribboned door-curtains to conjure the spirit of Open All Hours. There are mounds of out-of-date groceries, donated by a crew-member whose grandmother's shop recently shut up for good.
There's also - out of the window and over the road (just beyond West Bromwich's psychedelic new arts centre, the Public) - something for the production to kick against. From The Corner Shop's venue, we can just make out construction work on a new 374,000 square foot Tesco complex - cue more corner shop closures. Might Foursight inspire its audience to storm out after the show and sabotage the development opposite? "Incitement to corporate violence?" mulls co-director Frances Land. "Could we be done for that?"
That's unlikely, but there's no doubt on which side of the retail rivalry the company place themselves. Perhaps they've been seduced by all the entertaining stories that emerged from their the interviews. "There's the woman who wouldn't buy potatoes unless they fitted in her mouth," says Johnstone. Or the Black Country shopkeeper who received a visit from Sylvester Stallone. "The shop is really near the M6," one actor tells me. "I think his driver got lost."
Then there are the tales of hard work and sacrifices made by proprietors married to their stores. "The Asian shopkeepers talked about having to go to family weddings in shifts," says Johnstone. "Two brothers talked about their dad buying a caravan in Wales. The whole family visited it three times. The father visited it twice in seven years, and never stayed overnight."
Their interviews also reinforced the community value of the convenience store. "Corner shops will do everything," says Land, "from looking after your cat to staying open late if they know you're coming in for something. People go in there when they're lonely. They go in for advice. The shopkeeper will pop across the road because Mrs So-and-So's ill and can't get out of the house. It's the hub of the whole community." Adds Johnstone: "They're not the answer to society's ills, but they're one of the building blocks. As soon as we start taking them away, you begin to see what you're losing."
Which begs the question: why are communities letting their corner shops die? Maybe it's because some people don't value the social role and personal connection that such shops provide. Maybe it's because there are as many tatty and unfriendly corner shops as there are PJ Grocers. In any event, Land detects a determination among local stores to rage against the dying of their light. "More positive stuff came through than I thought - in terms of people's pride, their determination, and their ability to hang on and adapt. There's a real sense out there that the corner shop's got to fight, it's got to be shouting about what a brilliant thing it is. And with this project, we're doing that.""