Only the most fervent of cheerleaders would claim that the food offering in London’s Chinatown is universally wonderful. Too many of the restaurants serve claggy, poorly executed food served by waiters with interpersonal skills that make traffic wardens look like first-class airline stewards.

And yet, in the last decade, Chinatown has steadily improved. A growing appetite for and understanding of China’s regionalism has been met by restaurateurs offering the thrilling cooking of provinces such as Sichuan, Hunan and Xinjiang, alongside the food of Taiwan, rather than just a sloppy approximation of Cantonese.

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It would be a crying shame if all this real progress was stopped in its tracks by heavy-handed landlords seemingly with their eyes only on the bottom line.

Historically, British restaurant-goers have always been less willing to pay serious money for “ethnic” food than for European. As a result, central London’s Chinese restaurants – and its Indians and Thais – tend to be high-volume, low-margin operations leaving little wriggle room when it comes to swallowing an increase in the overheads. And when long-standing businesses are forced out, it has a wider, negative impact on the area as a whole.

But to portray multibillion-pound property firms as merely unscrupulous businesses with their eye on nothing but the bottom line is to oversimplify things. In truth, much of what’s happening is just brutal economics, rent hikes reflecting the demographic and financial changes that have taken place across the capital in the past 10 years. But the landlords don’t always sell to the highest bidder; they talk regularly of creating attractive “estates”.

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Outside London, independent landlords may well be in thrall to the mid-market chains, but in Soho, Chinatown and the surrounding areas, chain operators are regularly rejected in favour of independents more likely to improve the general mood of an area.

All well and good, but alongside the values of “hipness”, “attractiveness” and “vibe”, there must also be a responsibility to community. In my south London neighbourhood of Brixton and Herne Hill, businesses housed for decades in railway arches are fighting an attempt by their landlord, Network Rail, to force them out in the name of a refurbishment programme, with the prospect that when they return, their new rents will be unsustainably high.

Network Rail promises to bring in only independent businesses, but that’s not the point. Existing businesses have supplied cheap food and services to the local communities for decades. They are its beating heart. Replacing them with glossy, upmarket shops, however independent, will rip out that heart and character for ever. It’s a story repeated across Britain’s high streets, and its quickly gentrifying inner-urban neighbourhoods. Just as in Chinatown, landlords have to recognise that with their multibillion-pound property portfolios comes a responsibility – one that goes far beyond that to their shareholders.