George Michael in his shop

HOW do you picture your retirement?

George Michael painted quite a scene of paradise as he shut up his shop in Finchley Road Underground station for the final time on Friday.

The 70-year-old has spent 40 years cutting keys and cobbling shoes with the loud rumble of tube trains and with a near-constant stream of passengers bustling past his window.

“In northern Cyprus I feel at home every time I go back,” he said.

“The village has mountains behind it, forests full of pines. Down at the bottom you have the plain where we had our fields for agriculture. And then there is the sea, full of beautiful coves. You can sit there and listen to the noise of the sea coming in and out and be on your own.

“No one can disturb you. And then you can go-up into the forest and you will find the springs, water that comes straight from the mountains. You can stand there and get peace. It’s a very different world here.”

Mr Michael recalled how he arrived in north London as a Greek-Cypriot refugee still wearing his army boots. He worked in the rag trade before, with the help and solidarity of many other refugees in London, set up what he said became an incredibly successful business.

“I remember this old ‘hunchback’ Mr Bloom,” he said.  “He had the machines I needed and he came with me to see the shop. It was concrete here, only bricks with soot high up from the floor. Since the 1930s, no one had entered the shop.

“So, we pushed the door and he looked around and around and he said to me ‘grab it! This will be a goldmine’. Those words, I still remember them like yesterday.”

He said he was advised to go to Holborn to see another Cypriot cobbler, who trained him up for free, before he was sent to another of his former compatriots in Holloway who gave him tools he needed.

“And so the shop was beautifully arranged. And then, like a pool of water when you open it, the people gushed in,” he said.

In an era that Mr Michael described as the “glorious days of Thatcher”, he said the shop was cutting up to 6,000 keys a week.

“In the 1980s, the housing market was collapsing,” he said. “Estate agents were three times a day dropping the keys on the counter – ‘quick, quick, quick I’m waiting outside!’ It was the time of the yuppies. Money was everywhere.”

Mr Michael said that his time in the shop had helped him “mature”, adding that after seeing terrible horror in the war in northern Cyprus he now could “only forgive people”, adding: “You learn to be patient and to be polite and accepting of all nationalities, religions. If you have prejudice, you shed it.”

He added: “But it is with a heavy heart that I’m closing the shop. The community here became like my family. I have at least 60 presents and 70 cards from people. I have seen them cry. People that knew us, from St John’s Wood up to Golders Green, from Kilburn up to Hampstead, they all come here. They are going to miss us. But this is the ending.”

Mr Michael compared his journey at the shop to Homer’s Odyssey and said he was also inspired by the poet Cavafy, and recites one of his works about Ithaca, the island home of Odysseus.

“I have found my Ithaca,” he said. “It is a beautiful jewel that sparkles like diamonds.”