The owners of the 147-year-old family-run Croydon furniture shop that became a symbol of the riots as it burned have given up on their plans to reopen it.
House of Reeves was gutted by fire on the second night of violence.
Two years later, the site in the Old Town is still charred rubble.
The Reeves family, which owns 40 per cent of the site, has given up the lease. Mr Reeves said the Whitgift Foundation charity, which controls the other 60 per cent, wants to wait for a wider regeneration of Croydon before redeveloping the site.
The business continues to trade from a second shop adjacent to the destroyed site.
Graham Reeves, 54, said: “There’s a big redevelopment of Croydon, which means that while that’s being sorted out by the council you can’t get any building work done and the other landowners want to wait till that is finished before they will consider anything.”
