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Nicholas Mills and his sister Chelsey are standing outside their 96-year-old carpet stall inside Shepherd’s Bush Market in West London.

The longest-running stall there, it supplies Hollywood films and BBC costume dramas from an Aladdin’s cave of textiles.

Inside, by the till, is a photograph of their great-grandfather E Mills standing right where they are – in 1918 when the market was founded after the First World War.

“It has been in our family for four generations,” Nicholas, 31, says. “It’s like a family, the market.”

But this Christmas is likely to be the last for Shepherd’s Bush as an authentic market.

Next year, the area – including surrounding shops on Goldhawk Road, a day centre and flats for vulnerable people – will be “regenerated” into 212 luxury flats costing from £600,000 to £2million.

The land has been sold by Transport for London to developers Orion in a £150million deal given a green light by the previous Conservative council running Hammersmith and Fulham.

There are no plans for any social housing.

The market and shops have spent four years fighting back.

The Goldhawk Road shopkeepers have sunk their life savings into fighting two judicial reviews and have given evidence to a public inquiry, trying to end the compulsory purchase order.

(Image: BPM)

In February the Government’s own planning inspector, Ava Wood, recommended the CPO be rejected because of the real risk that the market and replacement shops “would not provide the ethnic diversity, independent or small-scale retailing environment central to the appeal of this part of the town centre”.

But on October 10 – after withholding the report for eight months – Communities Secretary Eric Pickles overturned the inspector’s decision.

Planning Minister Brandon Lewis announced the Secretary of State had decided to ignore the advice, and to confirm the CPO.

“It’s pretty unprecedented,” says Andy Slaughter, the local Labour MP who is campaigning to save the market.

“A CPO is something you’d normally use for something like HS2 or widening a key road – not to benefit developers.

Why does Eric Pickles want to sell off Shepherd’s Bush Market?”

The only hopes for the market now would be if the recently-elected Labour council at Hammersmith and Fulham can do something to unpick the deal or – if Labour wins the general election in May – it’s possible a new Secretary of State could reverse Eric Pickles’ decision.

Generations of West Londoners shopped here, long before the £1.6billion Westfield development. This year is no different as people pass under the Christmas tree to buy winter coats, halal meat and wrapping paper.

On the British Lingerie stall, Surjeet Duggal says the Market needed renovation not demolition.

“I have had this stall 25 years and I have worked here since 1984,” he says. “There has been a shop here since 1954. The customers know us, they know they can buy with confidence. We know their children. We served their parents.”

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The Goldhawk Road shops – also facing compulsory purchase – are as historic as the market itself.

The legendary eel and pie shop, A Cooke’s, appeared in Quadrophenia and has been in the same family since 1899.

Close by is Zippy’s Diner, a classic 60s cafe – still with the same fittings it had in 1960 and offering a three course meal on Christmas Day for £9.

The developers recently made A Cooke’s – the road’s most famous shop – a seven-figure offer they felt they couldn’t ignore.

None of the shops blame them, but they are also feeling the pressure.

Their neighbours include a world- renowned row of fabric shops that have been trading alongside each other for decades.

“This has been a drapers’ road for 163 years,” says Aniza Meghani, 49, owner of Classic Textiles.

“This shop has been here 50 years. It has been in my family for 35 years, since I was 15.”

Aniza’s family came to London from Uganda, East Africa.

Shepherd’s Bush isn’t just a destination postcode to them, it’s the place where they found sanctuary and a thriving business – after escaping the horrors of the murderous dictator Idi Amin.

“It will be devastating to go,” Aniza says. “It’s very raw. I am going to cry.”

When gentrification comes with its wrecking ball – a form of social plastic surgery – it forgets that markets are full of the threads of people’s lives.

But by next December the bulldozers of social cleansing will have cleared the path for a development branded as ‘SBM’.

A few stalls will remain, but every stallholder says the same thing, that the kind of people who buy million pound flats don’t want family butchers, cheap electronics and market fashions.

One shopper said to me. “If you look at the architect’s drawings, you’ll notice most of the people they are imagining in this Brave New World don’t look anything like us.”

Richard Olsen, chairman of Orion, says the green light from the Government “paves the way for the modernisation of the market to ensure it remains a vibrant centre for the area which local people can be proud of”.

Meanwhile, Brandon Lewis says the “regeneration scheme” will safeguard its “distinctive identity”.

Stallholders wonder if by next Christmas they will have been replaced by a trophy “pop up” marketplace at the heart of a luxury development – full of expensive produce local people can’t afford, the smell of expensive coffee and nostalgic wheelbarrows.

A vintage market made to look like genuine old London, but actually a mirage.