La Fromagerie is a specialist cheese store that continues to attract cheese-loving shoppers in the face of considerable local competition.

Call a shop La Fromagerie and a set of expectations are raised. The name indicates a place where there will be fancy cheeses of the kind that will either have people drooling or running for the door in search of fresh air.

Yet visit the shop that bears this name, in London’s upscale Marylebone, and while there is certainly a ‘cheese room’ this is also a shop where you can buy beautifully merchandised (and fearsomely priced) fresh vegetables, preserves, biscuits (for cheese) and a lot of wine.

As if this were not enough, there’s a semi-discrete room where you can relax with a coffee, glass of wine and something to eat.

All of the interior is done in that faux French peasant style that urbanites in this part of central London will regard as being close to a genuinely rustic experience.

The real point about this store, which is one of three in the capital, is that it inhabits the artisanal category niche that seems to be gaining traction in UK metropolitan areas everywhere. And tellingly, next door to this branch of La Fromagerie there is a branch of The Ginger Pig, a butcher where those with lots of money and a desire for ‘authenticity’ can treat themselves, for example, to a very large piece of dead cow.

All of which means clustering and where one artisanal retailer such as La Fromagerie becomes established, an area becomes a destination for others and attracts a particular type of customer in consequence.

Whatever the mechanics of creating a destination, however, La Fromagerie is a best-in-class store and while it may have been in this area for a long time, it continues to attract cheese-loving shoppers in the face of considerable local competition.