Jesmond’s food outlet owners are split on whether the high rents they pay on busy Acorn Road mean the street is good value for money.

Neil le Flohic, co-owner of Pink Lane Bakery, says he believes it is – that footfall on Acorn Road is good and includes a good mixture of potential customers from across the community. The bakery opened on Acorn Road at the end of July. It has another shop in the city centre and one in Gosforth.

“Gosforth shoppers are mainly families,” said le Flohic. “Our city centre shoppers are mainly a lot of young professionals, people stopping for lunch. But our Jesmond branch has both of those.”

Le Flohic says Acorn Road being a “destination” was an important factor in his decision to locate there. He says he concluded that even though the rent was “really expensive”, in the long term he believed it would be worth it for the footfall. “That has proved to be right,” he said.

“Acorn Road is not just a busy road with lots of people walking past, but it’s a destination for a lot of people. It’s got really good visibility too because it is quite a small road,” he said. “You can have quite a presence.”

However le Flohic admits his six-month projection for the shop didn’t quite go to plan. “The other two shops are in secondary locations and they work really well for us, but we had to make them into destinations,” he said. “When we opened our doors on Acorn Road we were slightly wrongfooted by the fact that we just opened the doors and there were already people there.

“I had an idea of how much we’d be taking and what staffing we’d be needing in six months’ time, but once we opened the doors we realised that we’d need that staffing now.”

Filip Tachan, one of three partners who own Greek street food restaurant Acropolis, shares this view of Acorn Road. “It’s a really good spot and an amazing street to have a shop on. We’ve been looking at that space for ages to be honest, and finally the time came and we got this shop.

“We had a very warm welcome from everybody in Jesmond – students and locals,” he said. “Business is good.” Acropolis handed out 1,000 free wraps to customers who waited in line on its opening day at the end of September .

However, not all businesses on Acorn Road are as enthusiastic. “It sounds great, Jesmond, but what you’ve got to look at is the clientele are students mainly now and they’re not as cosmopolitan as they think,” said Cal Kitchin, who recently sold his Cal’s Own pizza business on Acorn Road to Manhattan Pizza.

“You’ve got Tesco and Waitrose to contend with as well – selling pizzas, frozen pizzas, for a few quid and it’s not even anywhere near the same quality as a handmade, stone-baked pizza where the dough has taken three days to make.

“What I found was that students were just looking at the price. They weren’t doing the maths on the size of the pizza and how much they were getting.”

Although he agrees with Le Flohic that Acorn Road rents of £25,000 per year are high, he says other factors meant it had a more devastating effect on his business.

“We actually worked it out that we were cheaper than just about anywhere in Newcastle and for the rent that was paid on Acorn Road and buying all these ingredients in, it just didn’t make any sense,” he said.

Kitchin said he wasn’t willing to compromise on ingredients to reduce costs. The business was also hit hard by other external pressures, including the war in Ukraine.