How to Save Our Town Centres

A Radical Agenda for the Future of High Streets

Dobson, Julian

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781447323952
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Has the age of the internet killed our high streets? Have our town and city centres become obsolete? How to Save Our Town Centres delves below the surface of empty buildings and 'shop local' campaigns to focus on the real issues: how the relationship between people and places is changing; how business is done and who benefits; and how the use and ownership of land affects us all. Written in an engaging and accessible style and illustrated with numerous original interviews, the book sets out a comprehensive and coherent agenda for long-term, citizen-led change. It will be a valuable resource for policymakers and researchers in planning, architecture and the built environment, economic development and community participation.

Part One

Today

1

It took a riot

The night of 21 April 2011 witnessed a first in the history of Britain’s biggest supermarket chain. Tesco, the corporation that had grown from humble barrow-boy beginnings in London’s East End 92 years earlier to control almost one third of the UK’s grocery market and billions of pounds of household spending, was attacked by rioters in Bristol.

Eight police officers were injured in the disturbances in Stokes Croft, a neighbourhood just north of the city centre popular with artists and students. Several hundred people joined battles with the police after a heavy-handed raid on a squat known as Telepathic Heights. National media immediately labelled it the ‘Tesco riot’, linking the troubles with a vociferous local campaign against the company’s decision to open a Tesco Express convenience store in the busy Cheltenham Road.

Four weeks later Prime Minister David Cameron announced a review of the state of England’s high streets, fronted by the retail guru and TV presenter Mary Portas. Whether or not the so-called Tesco riot had influenced his thinking when the review was announced, a wave of rioting across England later that summer inextricably entwined the mayhem of street violence with the state of the nation’s traditional shopping streets. Suddenly the high street was not just ailing, but dangerous. The boundaries between shopping and looting seemed to vanish in five days of madness in early August.

During those feverish summer nights nearly 15,000 people were caught up in a surge of disorder, starting in London’s suburbs and spreading rapidly to Birmingham, Manchester and smaller towns. Five people died. Many more lost their businesses. Hundreds were fined or jailed as a result of the estimated 5,000 crimes committed that week.

What connects high streets and riots? At their heart, both are about the future of the places we live in, and where we base our everyday lives. The decline of the shopping street and the rioters’ willingness to trash their hometowns both illustrate and expose the disturbed and often dysfunctional relationships people in 21st-century Western societies have with the places they call home.

The August riots began, as many English riots have done, with a protest against the police. A young black man, Mark Duggan, had been shot by officers in Tottenham while they were attempting to arrest him. But the protests rapidly became something very different, and commentators were quick to seize on them as evidence of their favourite bugbears: moral decline, poor parenting, poverty and inequality, and the effects of the austerity programme imposed by the government the previous year. David Cameron lost no time in absolving himself of the latter charge, declaring: ‘These riots were not about government cuts: they were directed at high street stores, not Parliament’ (Cabinet Office, 2011).

The stores may not have been the cause of the rioters’ wrath, but there was no doubt they were the target of their revenge. The independent panel set up to investigate the troubles found that in addition to protesters and those seeking to fight the police, the rioters included a large number of ‘late night shoppers’, individuals seeking the latest goods and gadgets.

Some of the comments the investigators recorded were revealing. “I nick a radio and the world comes down on me, bankers take a million and nothing happens,” one said. “The pressure to have the latest designer items is immense,” complained another. “It wasn’t political – it was shopping,” one victim commented. It was as if a nation obsessed with bargains and deals had suddenly discovered the biggest bargain of all, instant access to what one called “free stuff” with a minimal risk of getting caught.

Some of the biggest brand names were ruthlessly targeted, with electronic devices, televisions and expensive trainers the favoured booty. As the riots inquiry panel observed:

The desire to own goods which give the owner high status (such as branded trainers and digital gadgets) was seen as an important factor behind the riots. In addition, the idea of ‘saving up’ for something has been replaced by the idea that we should have what we want when we want. Levels of personal debt are in part a scary testimony to this. When asked why he rioted, one rioter responded simply ‘greed’.

In our conversations both with rioters and with young people who did not riot, it was clear that brands and appliances are strongly associated with their sense of identity and status. In these riots certain brands and products were repeatedly targeted. (Riots Communities and Victims Panel, 2012, p 104)

If some of the Bristol rioters wanted to destroy Tesco because it was a symbol of rampant capitalism, it seemed many of the August 2011 rioters just wanted a fast track to the rewards of rampant capitalism. A contemporary study of 100 British adolescents by researchers at Manchester Business School found that consuming ‘the correct possessions at the right time’ was essential in achieving social acceptance, and the poorer a teenager’s family background, the more important it was to own the more expensive brands. The researchers described this as the ‘commodification of self-esteem’ (Isaksen and Roper, 2012, p 117).

Yet the brands and corporations that may have inspired anger or envy proved better able to weather the storm than the many small business owners who also suffered. The story of the House of Reeves furniture store in Croydon, which survived the Blitz of the Second World War but was burned to the ground on 8 August 2011, came to symbolise the destructive violence of that week. Shopkeepers and business owners were traumatised not only by the riots, but also by the task of negotiating with dilatory and obstructive insurance companies many months after the event. “Watching our whole life in flames haunts us every day,” a couple from Salford told the inquiry panel.

Something else happened in England’s high streets that week, and it was nothing to do with envy or grabbing the latest gizmo. Hundreds of people formed what were soon described as ‘broom armies’, using social media to summon friends and well-wishers to clean up the devastation. Thousands more expressed their support and helped to spread the word. It has been estimated that 90,000 people were involved in various ways. Photographs of local volunteers, brooms held aloft as they assembled at Clapham Common in South London, become the obverse of the week’s images of burning and looting. There were similar scenes in Manchester, with scores of volunteers wearing ‘I love Manchester’ t-shirts.

One of the main instigators of the riot clean-up was Dan Thompson, an artist and activist from Worthing on the south coast. Worthing, in keeping with its genteel reputation, was untouched by the troubles. But the clean-up demonstrated the power of the internet to mobilise people: from his laptop Thompson, already a passionate and persistent advocate of creatively reusing empty shops, helped to coordinate the broom battalions. He described the clean-up as anarchy at its best: ‘hundreds of individuals who, without leadership or state intervention, took to the streets and worked out a new way of doing things’ (Thompson, 2011).

The long death of the high street?

The events of 2011 put the high street centre stage. These ordinary streets, used and abused with scarcely a second thought most of the time, were forced to the core of the nation’s consciousness. How had they turned into such apparently dangerous and frightening places? It was hardly surprising that Britain’s soul-searching over the riots became conflated with angst over the state of our town centres. Combine that with a desperate hunt by political leaders for actions to blunt the edge of austerity and stimulate economic growth, and a pall of malaise and distrust fed by scandal after scandal in the UK’s financial system, politics and the media, and the result was a heady potion. As consciousness of the importance of our high streets was raised, so were expectations.

Boris Johnson, mayor of London, announced a package of £23 million of support for Croydon, one of the areas worst hit. ‘The devastation of the August riots is a reminder of the urgency of investing serious sums into this potential economic powerhouse,’ he declared (quoted in GLA, 2011). Smaller pots of cash were announced for other areas scarred by the disturbances. In Croydon, much of the money was to be spent on improvements to the public realm – the roads, pavements, street scenery and transport hubs.

Not once in the rush to help did political leaders stop to question whether these high streets had a future, or what sort of future they should have. The hurry to return to business as usual clouded any understanding of the changing nature of the places where the riots occurred, and of the public’s relationship with these places. The fact that the riot clean-ups were coordinated from a place dozens of miles from the scene of any violence sent a little-noticed signal about the way human interaction with physical places is changing in a digital age.

The relationship between people and their town centres is complex and ambivalent, and not only in the UK. The US has led the trend towards sprawling out-of-town malls and retail parks, and most of the Western world has followed. The rapidly developing economies of India, Brazil and China are leaping on the bandwagon, unaware of the wreckage it leaves behind. News reports in mid-2014 spotlighted Nigeria and Indonesia as emerging markets, with strong shopping mall growth from Spain to Singapore.

Many, particularly among major retailers, property companies and academics, argue that the high street, the traditional meeting point and marketplace at the heart of our towns, is dead or dying, and nothing can stop it. They point to the rise of internet shopping on top of the 30-year advance of out-of-town malls as evidence that not only are the public turning their backs on town centres, they no longer care what happens to them. A leading British academic, Alan Hallsworth, says the car-based food superstore has already become the ‘hegemonic retail format’ (Hallsworth et al, 2010, p 135). And as we desert our town centres, some say ghost towns or worse have become our just deserts.

Others, entrepreneurs and activists, have reacted to the apparent cynicism and despair with a passionate defence of traditional high streets, mounting imaginative or hectoring ‘shop local’ campaigns, celebrating and championing independent retailers, creating exciting and quirky ‘meanwhile’ and ‘pop-up’ enterprises to fill vacant spaces, and fulminating at the lack of help from government. High streets are not dead, they say – and they would be so much livelier if only the competition were fair.

Political leaders, meanwhile, have been quick to pick up the popular angst, if not to respond with any degree of wisdom. The choice of Mary Portas to head the 2011 review of the UK’s high streets was designed to send a clear message to the public that the government cared. Ministers knew she would generate headlines, and were not disappointed. A packed House of Commons debate in response to the review continued for more than six hours before legislators ran out of time.

Presenting her findings in December 2011, Ms Portas certainly ruffled a few feathers. ‘The days of a high street populated simply by independent butchers, bakers and candlestick makers are, except in the most exceptional circumstances, over,’ she announced at the beginning of her report (Portas, 2011, p 2). And if by that she meant the traditional Victorian high street as immortalised on a million Christmas card illustrations, she was right.

For most of human history, buying and selling has been intimately connected with living and socialising. The agora, the souk and the marketplace have been the places of connection and exchange, friendship and rivalry, gossip and scheming. In the 20th century that began to change. Business became bigger, more efficient and more profitable at the expense of being trusted and personal; interaction became an inconvenience. For every nostalgic view of the high street as a place where every trader knew every customer, there are miserable memories of shoppers lugging heavy bags from one store to another in the rain, or of circling frustratedly around town centre blocks in search of a place to park. The motor car that made towns accessible also made them aggressive and congested; the supermarkets that made shopping convenient also killed its diversity and humanity.

The meltdown has been a long time coming. In 1938, long before the concept of ‘clone towns’ was popularised, the editor of the Architectural Review, J.M. Richards, wrote:

In many places the personal and local character of the shops is disappearing. This is because many shops are now only branches of the big multiple stores, which for convenience are made all the same, and because of the use of ready-made shop fronts and fittings. But it is no use regretting the coming of the multiple store and the standardisation of shop fronts, as these are part of our modern way of organising business and do, on the whole, make better goods available for more people. Even if they do make towns look more alike, and therefore duller, it is a convenience when you are travelling to find branches of a shop you already know. (1938, p 8)

Fifty years later Professor John Dawson, of the University of Stirling’s Institute for Retail Studies, wrote in the Geographical Journal: ‘… there is a concern that the High Street shopping environment to which society has grown accustomed, whether as shoppers, investors, employees or entrepreneurs, is changing and we are not sure whether we will like either how it will change or what it will be changed to’ (Dawson, 1988, p 2).

Around the same time the UK government, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, commissioned a report, The future of the high street. Introducing its findings, Ann Burdus, chair of the Distributive Trades Economic Development Committee, commented on the signs of decay already evident in many town centres, and the effects on surrounding communities:

A decrease in the economic importance of a High Street has considerable social implications. Visiting a gradually deteriorating and derelict High Street is not an attractive proposition for most customers, particularly if many of the goods they want to buy are not available. High Streets of this type may have lost their function as meeting places because few people have an incentive to visit them; even fewer linger for social purposes. The crucial point seems to be that competition and market forces do not overcome problems associated with declining High Street shopping areas. (National Economic Development Office, 1988, p iii)

Several of the report’s recommendations bore remarkable similarities to those of the Portas review 23 years later. The fact that they had to be repeated more than two decades on bears witness both to the continuing public concern over changes in our town centres and the inadequacy of the actions intended to address them.

The physical hearts of our communities have always suffered periodic palpitations. What is different now is that – with a few notable exceptions – familiar activities are disappearing without a stream of new ones to take their place, or being replaced by activities of doubtful social and economic value. The legacy of economic recession, technological change and shifts in the way we shop and live are combining to hollow out the centres of places that were once bustling.

In 2008 the UK’s Competition Commission presented a snapshot of the decline of the independent high street grocer. The numbers of independent butchers and greengrocers fell from more than 40,000 each in the 1950s to one quarter of that figure in 2000. The number of bakeries fell from around 25,000 to around 8,000; the number of fishmongers from 10,000 to 2,000 (Competition Commission, 2008).

By early 2013, the failure of retailers in the UK since the onset of recession in 2008 had cost around 198,000 jobs and nearly £1.5 billion in lost rent for landlords (Ruddick, 2013). By December 2013 just under 12 per cent of all shopping was online, with British shoppers spending £675 million a week on the internet (ONS, 2014). Not only the shops are going: many of the institutions that once anchored town centres, from churches to libraries and adult education classes, have disappeared or diminished. The activities that brought people into town in the 19th and early 20th centuries are often no longer there, and sometimes no longer anywhere. As Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, California, there is no ‘there’ there. Richard Susskind, author of Tomorrow’s lawyers, recently predicted the end of the high street law firm (Legalfutures.co.uk, 11 January, 2013). Even the rats, some might say, are leaving the sinking ship.

The driving forces for these changes are complex. They include the growth of out-of-town shopping and the planning regimes that have facilitated it; the gobbling up of market share by large supermarket chains; property deals which have left many towns saddled with unviable and unnecessary shopping centres; mergers and acquisitions that have lumbered retailers with unsustainable debts coupled with demands for higher profitability; and not least, the growth of internet shopping which has made much of the physical space provided for retail in the last few decades redundant.

In the US the phenomenon has gone a step further, with out-of-town malls now succumbing to obsolescence and a burgeoning interest in revitalising ‘greyfield’ mal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of photographs
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part One: Today
• Part Two: Tomorrow
• References