ID checks are officious, mostly unnecessary, mistrustful and damage community.

When I was a young teenager, my Mum would give me the money to go and buy her some cigarettes - twenty Sovereign. It made sense because the newsagent and tobacconist was a mile away in Elmers End and I was going there on my bike to do a paper round. I'm sure I'm not the only person from my generation who bought cigarettes for their Mum or Dad.

These days, of course, this wouldn't happen. We live in an age of mistrust brought about by the decline of community, by the shopkeeper not knowing who is who in the little local community and, worse, frightened that if he doesn't ID every second customer some official is going to step in, throwing the book. Until a year ago I'd never been asked for any ID except for such things as getting a driving licence or passport (or overseas where they're a lot keener on ID stuff) - certainly not for any purchase, never in a shop or a pub or a bank.

The first demand for ID was in a London hotel. We'd booked, pre-paid and were staying one night - the receptionist requested a photo ID. I didn't have any on me and, after a brief (and smiling) exchange no ID was proffered and none required. It was, however, an indication of our society's mistrust - I could be someone other than the person who'd rung up, booked a hotel, paid for a room on a specified night. Unlikely but you never know...

We've become ID mad - supermarket checkout operators wear little badges telling me that if I look under 25 they'll ask for some proof of age if I try to buy a bewildering range of goods - fags, booze, fireworks, glue, knives, scissors, marches, cigarette lighters, drain cleaner and (so I've been told) large bottles of sugar rich fizzy pop. Operators demand ID to go in a bar, to attend a concert, to conduct a bank transaction - a million-and-one ordinary everyday actions that back when we trusted people were done without this officious rigmarole.

This ever expanding requirement to prove who you are so as to go about an ordinary life isn't a good thing. We're not safer, healthier or happier as a result of having to show some form of ID to a checkout operator or a doorman. Indeed, I've a feeling that this is a transfer of trust from the wisdom and judgement of people to a dumb pice of paper or plastic with a bad photo on it. And that in doing this we undermine community, the idea that nearly everyone, nearly all of the time behaves sensibly and doesn't require some self-appointed agent of the state (usually operating out of fear that not checking people's identity will bring down the wrath of that state) to second guess this truth.

As a conservative, the idea of community and the trust that comes from within that community is central to what we feel about the world. The moment we step away from this and say "don't trust anyone buying a bottle of wine or a packet of twenty fags, they might be lying" we lose a little more of that community. Places should be able to police themselves - they did so from time immemorial until we decided that managing drinking, smoking and such wasn't something we could entrust to a small community but needed national - even international - agencies to insist that the rules are enforced (for the children, naturally).

Today that ultimate measure of a community - going down to the local church hall to cast a vote in an election - is the latest ordinary action that is to be subject to ID checks. We're told this is to combat rising electoral fraud (despite the Electoral Commission repeatedly saying voter fraud is rare) - as they concluded "...there is no evidence to suggest that there have been widespread, systematic attempts to undermine or interfere with recent elections through electoral fraud." And remember that the only fraud ID checks might prevent is personation at the polling station, it doesn't prevent false registration, doesn't stop postal voting abuse, and doesn't halt voter intimidation (all of which are more serious problems).

To get this in context, there were over 50 million ballots issued in 2015 and just 34 cases of personation. There were only 481 allegtions of electoral fraud, two-thirds of which were deemed not to be offences. And we want to get Mrs Jones to produce a photo ID when she goes to the village hall in Lower Puddlebury because 0.0009% of ballots led to an allegation (0.0003% an investigation and less than 0.0001% a conviction) of electoral fraud. Worse, because Mrs Jones doesn't drive and hasn't got a passport, she'll have to go and get a special ID card to vote - all to prevent an almost imaginary problem.

We do too many ID checks. They are officious and mostly unnecessary. As conservatives we should remind those who govern us that trust is central to a good society. And that this constant checking up on people is mistrustful, undermines community and is bad for society.

....

How to save the high street - don't employ anybody

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So it seems:

Customers simply use their cellphones to unlock the door with a swipe of the finger and scan their purchases. All they need to do is to register for the service and download an app. They get charged for their purchases in a monthly invoice.

The shop has basics like milk, bread, sugar, canned food, diapers and other products that you expect to find in a small convenience store. It doesn't have tobacco or medical drugs because of the risk of theft. Alcohol cannot be sold in convenience stores in Sweden.

"My ambition is to spread this idea to other villages and small towns," said Ilijason. "It is incredible that no one has thought of his before."

He hopes the savings of having no staff will help bring back small stores to the countryside. In recent decades, such stores have been replaced by bigger supermarkets often many miles (kilometers) away.

Of course nothing is quite as simple as this - the shelves still have to be stocked and someone has to manage that stock, deliver that stock and handle customers. But the principle - that the simple process of buying a loaf of bread and some cheese can be entirely dehumanised - still stands and means that the advantage supermarkets have over local stores is diminished.

However, it does seem to me that the big losers in this battle (perhaps not in Sweden though) aren't the big hypermarkets with 100,000 lines and sophisticated delivery systems but rather the expanding market of small convenience stores run by those same stores. I suspect that, while this system will challenge 24-hour opening, the market for crisps and baby food at three in the morning is pretty limited.

Interesting stuff though.

....

Offering folk stuff to buy isn't enough for a place to work - you have to entertain them too!

Retailing as entertainment

The long-term transformative effects of ICT cannot yet be fully appraised in part because technology uptake is rapid and unpredictable. Nevertheless, in one aspect – urban design – a synergy has emerged between bricks-and-mortar merchants and planners, in reaction to virtualization. Their complementary efforts, when successful, imbue commercial space with interaction-based vitality. The human instinct for sociability further supports these efforts, evidence that there is no substitute for many of the benefits cities offer. Lives are arguably better in proximity, a point supported by decades of agglomeration and anthropological research. The challenge for planners, therefore, is to create space for meaningful experiences inimitable in the virtual realm.

OK it's a little bit wordy (as we'd expect from an American academic) but the point being made is central to the business of regeneration and the future direction of 'place-making'. The critical issue is that the 'field of dreams' approach that tended to dominate town centre development no longer applies - just because I build a shopping centre doesn't guarantee that people will flock to its hallowed halls. If all I offer is stuff to buy, the consumer has the choice of sitting on her step with a smartphone flipping through a vaster and more exciting range of stuff to buy.

Pay a visit to a recently developed shopping mall - say the Trinity in Leeds, for example - and check out the shopping. Isn't the most striking thing just how little of this there actually is in the new mall? There are dozens of places to eat and drink, there's a cinema, and there are shops - run by brands like Apple, Bose and Superdry - that are as much as branding and market positioning as they are about actually selling you stuff. We were in the Bose shop getting a demonstration of their TV (unsurprisingly the sound quality was beyond awesome although this didn't make up for its lack of smartness) and, in chatting to the sales assistant, we discovered that she wasn't incentivised to sell us stuff. No commission, no sales bonus - because the shop was there to promote and position the Bose brand.

If we want places to succeed then there has to be a reason for people to visit them - if what they offer can be perfectly replicated on-line (or, in some cases, imperfectly) then the chances are that people will access the offer through the web rather than by visiting some place. What places need to do is threefold.

1. Offer those things - chiefly around 'human sociability' - that can't be done on-line (even if they can). 'Live' music is only really live music if you're there - yes someone could stream it live to the smart TV in your lounge but is that the same? I would argue it isn't - we want the live because of the whole experience, the beer, the slight crush of the crowded venue, the sense of sharing a great experience with others. The ability to say 'I was there'. Just having a bar or foodstop isn't good enough - it needs a purpose beyond that mundane fact, a presence that can't be replicated with a bottle of wine from the supermarket and some home cooking.

2. Connect with the on-line world. We went to the Prado in Madrid and, unplanned, bought an offer to guide us round from a smartly dressed gentleman. He showed us 10 - just ten - pictures from the thousands in the gallery. And these pictures taking us from the middle ages to the 21st century told us a story of art down those ages. We could have hired one of those clunky electronic gadgets as a guide but wouldn't it be more interesting if a little smartphone app could replicate the sort of offer that gentleman made for us?

3. Focus on the occasion, the event and the demonstration rather than just the sale. It's true that the value of the place comes in part from the value that consumers invest in that place - and much of this is, inevitably, a cash value. But, as Apple, Bose and many other brands have shown, the value of a public presence needn't be about selling you some stuff. Rather it's about showing you what that stuff can do, reminding you that the stuff in question is popular (why else would there be a big shop fill with other people looking at that stuff), and reinforcing your decision to buy it.

I'm quite excited about the future for town centres, malls and other shared places. Partly this is because the domination of public space by retail is nearing its end but mostly it's because the evidence right now is that successful places are places where the special stuff - the things that make them work - are made by the people visiting rather than for the people visiting. A new generation of entrepreneurs are creating new approaches to public fun and games - from political debates in a pub to cheese tasting and street parties.

And where there are lots of people having a good time there's the opportunity to enhance that good time by selling them the stuff they want (even if they didn't know they wanted it until just a minute of so ago). For public authorities there's a difficulty because of an instinctive discomfort with things that disrupt existing markets and existing expectations. Excuses will be used to prevent or slow the initiative of these new ideas - the street vendor or market stall undercuts the shopkeeper, selling alcohol in the street encourages anti-social behaviour and your funky flea market needs a "markets licence" for some bizarre reason.

What we know is that many of the best examples of this new place-making reflect this development. I prefer to call this consumer-led but, if you're uncomfortable with the idea of being a consumer, citizen-led works just as well:

Authentic urban transformation relies more on citizen initiative than the influence of global capital, and may be facilitated by ICT but not defined by it; this can be seen in the quiet regeneration of urban neighborhoods. Global capital may underwrite loans for acquiring properties and developing land, decisions in such neighborhoods are often made locally and in the type of fragmented manner that generates a bricolage of uses and styles. Examples in the United States include East Nashville, Kansas City’s Crossroads district, and Oakland’s foodie Temescal and KoNo districts. None displays the architectural shock-and-awe of emerging global mega-cities, but each embodies a citizen-level developmental determinism that shapes their design and atmosphere. They are literal incarnations of the unique priorities of citizens at that time and place, independent of global trends that often result in regression to an aesthetic mean.

....

A Co-op memory.

It's 1977. Mum had sent me to buy an iron. I had complete instructions - the particular iron to be bought, how much it was on sale for and where to buy it. So I toddled off to the selected location clutching the cash needed for the purchase - the Co-op on Penge High Street.

I entered the Co-op (for current Penge residents the Co-op isn't there any more but it's next door to the Odeon Cinema that isn't there any more either) and look around for the location of the iron. After a moment's scrutiny of the signs - they weren't especially helpful, I recall - I headed to the most likely spot. You need to appreciate that, at no point in this adventure had there been any human encounter or indeed any encouragement for that encounter to happen.

I found the iron, checked its price and began the next phase of the adventure - trying to buy the blessed thing. From the spot I was stood there was no obvious "pay here" sign and, unlike the supermarket, there wasn't a bank of checkouts before the main doors.

"Aha," I thought and headed for the food section of the store clutching my iron, "they have checkouts there."

So I queued and, once at the front of that queue, presented my iron for payment.

"You can't buy that here, love."

"Oh. Where?"

An arm was waved in the vague direction of the main store (from where I had just come).

"Over there in the store."

I trudged back to the main store. In a distant corner, I spied what might be a shop assistant. I headed that way and it was such a person. They were unpacking a box and placing it's contents on the sales desk. Carefully, one item at a time.

And ignoring me stood shuffling from foot to foot a couple of yards away clutching a ten pound note and an iron. After a while, the assistant looked up and grunted.

"Wanna buy that, mate?"

"Er, yes." I held out the iron and the £10.

"Gotta go to the pay desk for that."

"Er, where..."

"By the lift."

I turned and headed towards the indicated location. And, yes, the pay desk was there. However, there was one small problem, there was no-one behind the desk to actually pay. I stood. I looked around for a bell to ring or maybe some instructions as to where to go in the event that the pay desk was unmanned. Nothing.  So I stood some more.

A older woman shambled over after what seemed an eternity.

"Can I pay for this please, " says I in an ever-so-slightly frustrated tone.

"Ysfffs" mumbles the woman and starts trying to insert a key hanging from a string on her belt into the till. After three or four goes at this, the till finally responds with those little lights and bells the new electronic wonders have to entertain us.

And I can complete my purchase. The woman seems somewhat affronted that someone actually wanted to buy something, as if this was not the reason why the Co-op had a big department store on the High Street.

"Thanks," I said once the sale was complete.

And I walked out from the shop. Not sure I ever went in again before it closed a couple of years later. Didn't seem much point since they didn't really want any customers.

....

Integration and the shop as brand marketing....more thoughts on the High Street

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When I came to Bradford, I came as an account executive at a direct marketing agency. And, back then, direct marketing was flavour of the season. The advent of databases, the collection, manipulation and analysis of information, and the idea that we could tailor our offer or appeal to the target consumer - these things made us the scientists of marketing set against the flash, braces-wearing 'above-the-line' folk making those useless TV adverts.

But direct marketing seemed a stale term, more akin to door-to-door selling than to the white heat of information technology. With all our profiling, multiple regression, expert systems and data-mining we rebadged the business - firstly as database marketing, then as relationship marketing - before realising that the unreliable, untargeted advertising was still there, our clients were still spending more on this than on letters and leaflets.

So integrated marketing was invented. Or rather it wasn't, we simply realised that the different bits of marketing activity needed to work together if the campaigns were to succeed. Our clients needed brand marketing as well as targeted marketing.

What's all this got to do with the high street, I hear you cry? Put simply bricks and mortar based retailing has to make use of on-line promotion and sales - we know this and every retail strategist worth his salt is focused on making this transition. But what we haven't appreciated is that this isn't a shift from real to virtual with the high street vanishing but the integration of different channels and their use for marketing as well as selling.

Here's Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com:

“Our view from the marketplace is that there is going to be a form of humanity, and consumers are still going to be interacting with the high street,” he said, explaining that consumers will always prefer to look and feel products and connect with retailers on a face-to-face basis. “What Rakuten’s Play.com is trying to do is be able to offer the services so that high street retailers can have the services without the massive costs and infrastructure to build a digital proposition within a marketplace. So our position is very much not about Cannibalisation, but more about working together with the high street and being able to offer a digital proposition that works in collaboration with a tangible, physical, high street environment.”

All a bit wordy but, in essence, what Stewart is saying is that the virtual retail world needs the high street environment because customers crave tangibility. The problem is that those tangible retailers will struggle to succeed alone - the store becomes as much about brand development and promotion as it is a sales channel.

This can take the form of the spectacular - here's the Johnny Walker House in Beijing:

Diageo describe this as:

...the Johnnie Walker House serves to meet consumer demand for luxury with substance. Blending a bar, museum, retail outlet and an exclusive members club, the Johnnie Walker House Beijing is a response to the demand from Chinese consumers for in-depth knowledge, not only of the specific luxury brands they indulge in, but also of the broader categories the brands fall under.

If you want the more mundane you can check out Disney's presence in Walmart - for sure this makes sales but it's just as much about maintaining the ubiquity of Disney as a brand. Plus of course there's the wonder that is the Apple store - again there's no obvious need for a high technology brand to have a high street presence but the stores provide a strong brand impression in the real world (as well as flogging the odd iPad). When the new product launch comes along and all the fans want one it's better marketing to have all those fans queueing in the town centre than to have them invisibly poised over the 'enter' key on their laptop.

Just as importantly - and this matters in thinking about our centres - the customers that the brand owner wants in his store aren't simply any old customer who wanders by - here's Stewart again talking about retail banking:

 “A very good, corporate, customer, with a high lifetime, probably wants to go in to see a bank manager, and banks need to be able to facilitate that conversation and offer a good service,” Stewart explains. “But a customer who is churning on zero per cent credit cards, banks want them to interact digitally."

Just as Diageo wants high net worth customers in the Johnny Walker House, the future high street success wants high spending, high end customers - the every day buyer can shop from his computer and have it delivered or collect from the Post Office. In town retailing becomes an event, an orchestrated, animated marketing promotion. The customers walking into you shop are there because you've invited them - to a product launch, an anniversary, a preview. They're dressed up to party not slouching round the shops in jeans and an old t-shirt.

Inside you'll get them to engage on-line even more - to like the Facebook page, to follow on Twitter, to join an on-line club for the best customers. And they'll go away and become your best sales people - bragging and preening about the brand urging their friends to get involved.

This integration will be - for retailers - the essence of success. Without a strong on-line presence the retailer cannot compete once over a third, perhaps half, of retail sales are virtual. But that isn't enough - the best retailers will see the shop as one of their essential marketing tools, as a place of rewards, celebration and excitement. As the thing that captures the idea of that brand as fun - as leisure and pleasure.
....

“Our view from the marketplace is that there is going to be a form of humanity, and consumers are still going to be interacting with the high street,” he said, explaining that consumers will always prefer to look and feel products and connect with retailers on a face-to-face basis. “What Rakuten’s Play.com is trying to do is be able to offer the services so that high street retailers can have the services without the massive costs and infrastructure to build a digital proposition within a marketplace. So our position is very much not about Cannibalisation, but more about working together with the high street and being able to offer a digital proposition that works in collaboration with a tangible, physical, high street environment.”
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99

Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99

Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99

Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99

Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99

I'd love for the Women's Institute to save the high street but it won't

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The Women’s Institute is a great organisation – not just because it (somewhat childishly) slow-hand clapped Tony Blair or because of those ladies in the Dales who took their clothes off. No, the WI is important because is encapsulates the importance of doing things rather than calling for other people to do things.

Those ‘things done’ might not be earth-changing and indeed might be the ideal target for ever-so-slightly smug comedians (usually the ones who are, you know, faintly embarrassed at being middle-class or worse still posh). But they are ‘things done’ which makes them vastly more valuable than either ‘things discussed’ or ‘things we want someone else – usually the government – to do’.

Which brings us to saving the high street:

The group’s 212,000 strong membership will turn its attention to boosting local town centres, small retailers and communities. There will be a lobbying campaign on a local and national level and it hopes to use its strength to influence Government policy.

It seems a shame that the WI – at least nationally – have slipped from the idea of ‘things done’ and into becoming just another lobbying organisation. One hopes that there is a little more to this campaign than just bothering MPs or trying to ‘influence government policy’. There is a little hope in that the aim is for WI members to do something – or so says Marylyn Haines Evans, chair of the public affairs committee:

“We are not calling on our members to boycott online shopping or to stop using out-of-town shopping centres and major supermarkets. What we are asking is that they go first to their local shops.”

This is admirable. And of course will make absolutely no difference at all to the prospects for the town centre, the high street or the local parade of shops. Not just because there aren’t enough WI members (many of who are already the sorts who use their local shops anyway) but because the high street – even the little local centre simply isn’t about shopping any more. Don’t get me wrong, there will still be shops including those treasured (but underused butchers, bakers and greengrocers) but we’ll head for the centre as a result of other appeals and interests – mostly because of leisure and pleasure.

The little parade of shops might work because it has a little coffee shop and deli or a child care centre. Maybe the presence of specialist housing for older people might help as they prefer the short walk to the shops over the bus ride to Tesco. And it will work even better if there's a little park where folk can sit or a playground for the children. The new mini-supermarkets that cause such consternation will help too as on-line customers pop in for their ‘click and collect’ groceries. The old ‘secondary’ retail location has a good future – it may look a little different from the parade we remember from our childhood but it will work.

It’s the next level up – the town centre – that there’s a worry. The comparison bit of comparison shopping is increasingly done on-line. Even in the malls and centres shoppers are checking goods they fancy against prices on-line – either to give them a bargaining tool in the store or, more likely, to click, buy and have delivered. Town centre retail will be more about things you can’t get online so easily, things like care and beauty where you need to person to provide the attention and titivation. Plus places that are more about brand or event than about sales – the idea of a book shop where rather than to buy a book people go to meet authors, to hear readings or simply to sit and chill isn’t so far away, and we’ve already got shops and spaces from Disney, Panasonic and (in the Far East at least) big spirits brands such as Johnny Walker.

This is retailing as entertainment, a distance away from the everyday task of getting things we need – the weeks shopping, clothes for work or school, things to mend and fix. And for town centres it is part of the mix – not everything but important as retail changes. Alongside this will be the ever changing mix of junk, tat and the unique that is the market – not merely the municipal market but the flea market, the farmers market, the concession store and the bazaar. When rents fall in town centres (and they will) these uses will flood into where we once had department stores and shoe shops.

The town centres that win will be those that embrace these changes not the ones who try to use regulation, planning or taxation to prevent the change. Some of them will be surprising places where local sensibility (and the WI) didn’t get in the way and where different uses were encouraged. Various folk have been talking about this change, of the move from the workaday to the pleasurable, of town centres as stages for events – from the birthday celebration or the stag do to formal organised and promoted occasions, from the spontaneous celebration of a win at football to the Scouts St George’s Day Parade.

Town centres and local councils that try to manage this stage the wrong way – through outdoor drinking bans, herding people away from events or stopping busking and peddling – will find quickly that places with a more open attitude, prepared to tolerate a little more noise, late nights and fun, will get the footfall and the businesses that live off that footfall.

So perhaps the WI, rather than lobbying government, should set up stall in the town centre – sell some jam, play some music, hire a clown and contribute to making local centres lively again!

...

Sir Terry Leahy is right about supermarkets...

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About supermarkets:

Asked if seeing boarded-up shops made him sad, Leahy said: "It does, but it is part of progress. People are not made to shop in supermarkets, they choose to shop there.

"High streets– some of them are medieval and the way that we live our lives now is very different, so what you have to do is make sure the benefits do outweigh the costs, and I think that they do."

It pains me to agree with Sir Terry since I like those independent shops. But he's right - there is no doubt that, on balance, society has gained from the success of supermarkets like Sir Terry's beloved Tesco. Just as we no longer have to pound away washing clothes by hand, bash at carpets with a big stick or get on our knees to scrub the hearth, we no longer have to spend hours each week traipsing from small shop to small shop merely to get the things we need.

Instead we can read, we can sing, we can enjoy a bit of leisure - make the most of all the good things progress (and I mean real progress here, the fruits of capitalism, not the fake progress socialists offer) has brought us. Television, computers, games, foreign holidays, thousands of songs on one little pod.

Our lives are richer than they've ever been and the supermarket has played a big part in creating those riches. Rather than a limited selection at the shop on the corner, we've access to thousands of different products under one roof. We don't have to walk round in the rain, snow and sleet but can make our choices in the warmth and light of indoors - choosing vegetables and fruit throughout the year, flown in from Peru, Kenya and Sri Lanka. We can experiment with odd foreign grains, with twenty types of rice and a hundred different teas and coffees.

All this isn't just available to the elite. Everyone has this choice on the doorstep. And it enriches our lives in a hundred ways. Yes, Sir Terry, supermarkets are great!

....

...

Can we now stop saying town centres are for shopping?

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‘She kept an antique shop – or it kept her.
Among Apostle spoons and Bristol glass,
The faded silks, the heavy furniture…’

I've felt like something of a lone voice in all this - bashing away at the shiny regeneration on the one hand while pointing out to locovoracious folk that their dream of twee high streets filled with organic independent shops (probably workers co-ops or some other form of trendy model) is just as daft.

Indeed these people - epitomised by Julian Dobson - still bash away at the idea that there's some magical system of common ownership that will change the high street:

What’s broken isn’t just the retail model of HMV or Jessops, or the business rates system, or city centre parking, or any of the individual bugbears blamed for the demise of the high street. What’s broken is our own ability as citizens to share in the ownership, management and use of the spaces we occupy. It’s about the whole place, not just the shops.

 

I agree that it's about the whole place. I agree that it isn't just the shops. But this idea of us "sharing" the ownership is just so much wiffle. I'm not interested in some sort of 'commons' system where I sort of own it but not really and where we get endless rows and scraps about who should be allowed to do what on that common land. Up here in Cullingworth, the council stopped fifty years of moto-cross and scrambling on the Flappit because it wasn't the right sort of use for that particular 'urban common'.

If you want things to work, they have to be owned. And right now the only bits of the town centre that are 'owned' are the shops, which is why we're still talking about retail rather than about town centres as the stage on which we perform. In the Portas Review we read how the high street needs to be run more like a business - more like the out-of-town malls in fact:

 

“High streets should be run more like businesses. And businesses are run on the basis of strategic vision. However, unlike the sophisticated shopping malls or large retailers, high streets aren’t overseen by a single landlord or professional management body.”

 

The retail establishment - the shiny regenerationist - view is that we carry on more-or-less as before - rather as we see in Bradford where the council uses its own funds and Regional Growth Fund to subsidise the business rates of new or relocating businesses. A straightforward bung to businesses will do the trick. Except they don't appear to be flocking to the city.

 

As we see, the trendy place-maker view is all around 'commons' or, as Julian Dobson now seems to want, a public corporation approach. I don't think this will work - either we get the tradedy of the commons revisited or we get another pseudo-political corporation that can be captured by the very town centre interests Julian so dislikes.

 

My view is that we need to be far more radical:

A radical approach would be to transfer all that council owned land – the streets, the pavements, the market halls, the offices and the parks – into a for-profit company. Where, as in many places, the council owns freeholds of retail premises these can be added to the pot. And use that asset to create the excitement, the events and the environment – the “21^st Century urban entertainment centre” that Ms Portas describes. That would be a radical approach rather than the rewarmed versions of existing – and mostly unsuccessful – strategies presented by Ms Portas.

The ownership of the company could vary – maybe co-operative or mutual, perhaps the local council or possibly a combination of these approaches. But it is essential – if the town centre is to be run like a business – the company is for profit. For it is the search for profit that makes the shopping malls and supermarkets creative, innovative and focused on getting the experience right for the customer.

 

Most importantly this approach isn't founded in shopping - for there is no future in retail as the main determinant of the town centre environment.

....

Punishing shopping centres won't save the high street

Skipton Market - my kind of shopping but not to everyone's taste

I like Julian Dobson’s stuff; he talks sense about the challenges facing town centres (although his prescriptions and solutions seek to put a finger in the dyke of consumer behaviour rather than try to direct its flow). But sometimes his heart is too firmly on his sleeve and he loses the grip on common sense.

So it is with his reaction to the claim from the British Council of Shopping Centre that their collections of emporia are at “the heart of the community”. Rather than considering that this signals worry rather than arrogance, Julian launches into his “I hate shopping centres” mode and proposes a nonsensical set of ideas for those shopping centres to “prove” their central location in “the community”.

Let’s look at them:

“...every shopping centre operator should sign a public Community Reinvestment Pledge...”

Why just the shopping centre Julian? Why not the artisan baker, the trendy clothes boutique and the ‘independent’ coffee shop? How are they any different and shouldn’t they be making this same pledge? Truth is, of course, it’s just another cost to the business – means higher rents and these mean higher prices. But I guess Julian doesn’t about that as he’s not on a budget.

“...ask their tenants to pay staff a living wage: one that gives people enough to live on, not a minimum wage.”

Sounds great doesn’t it! And the same applies – those retailers not in the shopping centre should also pledge to pay a living wage surely? Again though – although doubtless Julian will be swiftly on with talking nonsense about the regional multiplier – the main effect is to increase costs (wages are one of the two big retail costs and the other, rent has been put up by the “Community Reinvestment Pledge”). And higher costs mean higher prices. Great idea!

“...they should dedicate a portion of every centre to community or civic space.”

Another impost that means higher rents – it all sounds great but why should a commercial venture do this? Out in Julian’s beloved high street, they aren’t clambering all over each other to give away space to ‘community or civic’ uses. They’re quite rightly looking for paying tenants and, if the Council wants a library or the community group a meeting space they can pay the rent just like everyone else does.

Right now it’s a pretty tough time for high street retailers – the country’s economic problems and the rapid growth in e-commerce and m-commerce make it ever more difficult for traditional retail models to succeed. Dreaming up passive aggressive pseudo taxes for shopping centres – punishing them for being “bad” – is a recipe for more closures, more job losses, more business failure and more empty parades with the occasional crisp packet or flyer doing a passable impression of tumbleweed.

What annoys me most about this anti-retail (or rather anti-certain kinds of retail that we disapprove of for no obvious reason other than that they are national businesses) approach is that it will do nothing to change the decline of high streets or the loss of independent shops. There is a rather patronising, middle-class, guardian-reading pomposity about the “save the high street” rhetoric. It reminds me of folk who criticise McDonalds while tucking into their £20 of hand-formed, lamb burger in some trendy gastropub. It’s not the bad diet but a sniffy, “that’s a bit common” attitude – and hating shopping malls is much the same.

I don’t like those malls but that’s my preference so I seek out other places. Yet millions of people do like shopping malls, visit them often and get real pleasure from shopping in those dreadful national chains. I know this because that’s precisely what millions of people do every weekend. Who am I – or Julian – to criticise that choice, to say that our preference for trendy shops in windy alleys is better that shiny shops in glittering malls?
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Crying foul at supermarkets won't save the High Street. Getting the offer right just might...

Skipton High Street - success in a small town with three supermarkets

In an article containing a vaguely linked set of slightly left-wing presumptions, John Harris in the Guardian explains how the High Street is “under attack”.

Now, dear reader, set aside images of tripod-like Martian war machines stomping into Cheam and Cheltenham or perhaps sinister masked ninja figures rolling grenades into Marks & Spencer and turning over benches or plant pots in the Arndale. No we’re talking here about those besuited plutocrats that the Guardian so hates (bejeaned, Tuscany-dwelling plutocrats are, of course, fine).

The truth is that big business has failed us, twice. First, while distant high street landlords endlessly put up rents, the boom years saw the accelerated replacement of independent shops with the chains whose names – Game, Peacocks, JJB Sports – denoted the stereotypical clone town. Soon enough, the same firms became bywords for the aftershocks of the crash – and left behind the retail equivalent of scorched earth.

Sadly for Mr Harris, the truth is a great deal more prosaic that this – the High Street is dying because people prefer to shop elsewhere. And where they don’t prefer to shop elsewhere, High Streets – or more to the point, town centres – are not dying.

Perhaps Mr Harris should take a trip to Keighley (I know John, it’s in the North) and walk around this pretty ordinary town counting the empty shops. Sadly for Mr Harris’s thesis he won’t find very many. Indeed, if he walks down Cavendish Street, he’ll see an eclectic mix of shops. For sure, there’s a ‘cash converter’ sort of place and a couple of charity shops. But in amongst there’s an old-fashioned cobbler, an independent toy shop, a gift shop or two, a hairdresser and – wonder of wonders – a hardware store run by a man who actually mends things!

All this in a town with three supermarkets (five if you include Aldi and Iceland, six if you include the wonderful Shaan’s Asian supermarket) – it seems that, if you get the environment right and the offer right, town centres can succeed. And that having supermarkets isn’t the death knell for the High Street either.

Mr Harris spends a deal of time championing negative campaign groups such as Tescopoly rather than asking what might be done to improve and develop – even save – the town centre. We should bear in mind that the fastest growing retail sectors are on-line and factory outlets. Even further from the town centre than the terrible Tesco or the sinister Sainsbury. Places that – despite Mr Harris’s worst fears haven’t killed his “adopted” home of Frome.

Frome has seven – yes folks, seven – supermarkets (Sainsbury, Tesco, ASDA, Somerfield, Iceland, Lidl and Co-op) as well as:

...a town centre that has the rare luxury of scores of independent shops.

The truth in all this is that not only is the negative impact of supermarkets overstated (there is a negative impact but it’s on jobs and secondary grocery outlets, the corner shop, rather than town centre comparison shopping) but this is yesterday’s battle. Today we should be thinking about the role of town centres where comparison shopping has moved on-line.

A while ago I wrote about how our view of town centres has to change:

The driver to the success of Main Street isn’t the shop – although to hear us talk about town centres you would think that – it is the relationship we have with that place and the space it provides for the events and activities of our lives. In Bradford, when Pakistan win at cricket, hundreds of fans head for the local centres. Not to shop but to share their happiness at victory.

Yet we distrust such a use for the spaces of our town centres. Many of us grumble about public drinking, about young people gathering together, about hen parties and stag dos. And we certainly dislike political campaigns and religious promotion (unless of course it’s an official and state-sanctioned occasion) – to the point of complaining about these activities.

To make town centres work we need to start thinking about them differently:

1. places of performance – planned or otherwise
2. centres of culture not temples to shopping
3. a locus for excitement and discovery rather than the workaday
4. as venues for communal celebration, sharing and festivity

In the end, town centres have to be wanted. Not because campaigners have driven away choice but because people want to go there – to shop, to eat, to promenade, to listen, to watch, to sing. The negative attitude of John Harris and his sort won’t change a thing. What will change the town centre is making them places that people – old, young, rich, poor – want to visit. Places of leisure and pleasure - centres of delight, the focus of fun.

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