Place's need impresarios not managers - thoughts on reviving Britain's towns

 It was raining. Not the soft springtime rain that makes everything sparkle but that cutting, icy rain you get in Keighley's winters. Everyone is moving quickly, collar up, wanting to get their business done so they can get home. It's a scene repeated across the North's small towns, no bustle and hustle just get the job done and get home. Of course, the rain didn't help but neither does the gradual hollowing out of the town's offer - Marks and Spencer has gone, the market is a little gap-toothed with empty stalls and the glorious architecture of North Street can muster only a tattoo parlour and a couple of dowdy charity shops.

I'm sure that, were I to return to Mexborough where I interviewed market traders for my masters degree dissertation, I'd see the same. And the same slightly tired looking people would say the same things - a slightly bewildered take on why their town has gone from a happy bustling place to the depressing high street it is now. People will blame the supermarkets, Amazon and the council but then remember that their daughter-in-law ordered all that stuff off her phone for them. Hesitating they'll return back to their theme - ideas like an online shopping tax or cuts to business rates sound good to them as does more investment.

Across the whole of England, not just the North, this pattern is repeated. For every thriving town like Harrogate there's a dozen like Keighley or Mexborough. We get excited at how Whitstable, Hebden Bridge or Saltaire is thriving and glibly assume that with a bit of grant money, some paint and good wishes the same can be true of Sittingbourne or Scarborough. And this isn't just a British problem - you'll see the same in France, in Spain and across the USA. Outside tourist destinations, wealthy exurbia and delightful university towns, the pattern of decline is everywhere - fewer shops and fewer customers and a narrative harking back to what it was like in the old days.

Back in my advertising days, we used to talk about the "magic wand" clients. They'd arrive at our door with a brief that said something like "we're in the same business as (name of successful company), make us the advertising that will do the same for us". And we, being the good direct marketers that we were, would patiently explain that the company they wish to emulate built up its business over two decades and, as my colleague John Hinchcliffe would observe, "marketing isn't about magic it's about boring routine day after day". The client would listen and then respond with "ah, but...".

If we are to do something to improve these towns - and the new government seems set on doing so - we need to start by being honest about what can be done and what can't be done. The high street of the 1960s isn't a realistic aim and nor can we point to a place with millions of tourists visiting every year and 'replicate' what's there (and, however hard it tries, your town probably isn't going to get those millions of visitors). Nor will there be some sort of shopping revolution - even with an "Amazon Tax" - that will see all those old shops we vaguely remember returning to the high street.

So what should we be doing (other than making clear that there's no magic wand)? For some the whole thing is really about cities - if you make it ever so easy for people to whizz from these declining towns into the bright lights of the nearest city everything will be fine. And, in economic terms I have some sympathy with this view that towns need to become nice dormitories for well paid city workers if they are to succeed. But the problem with this is that, not only is well-paid employment dispersed, but that there simply are too many towns for this strategy to work for all but a few. The approach will be great for Otley or Hexham but do we really believe that putting on slightly nicer trains into Sheffield from Mexborough will suddenly make well-paid Sheffield workers move there?

Right now local councils, regional mayors and combined authorities across the North and Midlands are drawing up plans to get their slice of central government regeneration cash. These plans will include welcome investment in rail infrastructure, road schemes of one sort or another as well as plans for buses, cycleways and pedestrianisation. There'll be an assortment of town centre improvements, the encouragement of town centre living and lots of talk of 'green infrastructure'. But I worry that, in the end, there'll be more disappointment than transformation as high street shopping continues its decline and people vote with their feet. There's an irony too about that investment in speedy connections for workers - getting into the big city centre doesn't just help commuters, it means shoppers have more choice of where to spend their pound. Why would you go to Keighley when, for a few quid and half-an-hour, you can zoom into Leeds on a train and shop there?

The principle changes on the high street are the continued decline in comparison shopping as online buying grows, the arrival of the shop as a brand marketing tool and the shift from buying stuff to leisure and pleasure as the main driver of activity. My wife and I joke about our Christmas shopping trip to Harrogate - we drive there and park, have a coffee then do some perfunctory shopping before having a nice long lunch followed by a frantic dash round to the couple of shops we always planned to visit. On your next visit to a thriving high street, count the number of cafes, bars and restaurants, look at how boutiques, bookshops, delis and gift shops also serve food and drink. Then consider the arrival of new destinations - escape rooms, indoor crazy golf, adult ball pools (and those for the more traditional child audience), mini-cinemas and those places where you can paint a piece of crockery while having a cup of tea.

My view of the high street changed way back in 2007 when I read a (2005) article by Susie Pryor and Sandford Grossbart entitled "Ethnography of an American Main Street":

Other consumers and retailers describe social activities on Main Street, which they associate with a variety of experiences, including dining; window shopping; strolling for relaxation; jogging for health reasons; pub crawls; wine tastings; book clubs; language clubs; craft guilds; charity events; art events; parades; demonstrations; mass celebrations following major sports victories; and meeting friends. Many informants also refer to social interactions between and among retailers and consumers.

We got ourselves trapped in the idea of the town centre as a prosaic place of shopping, the old world of Hoagy Carmichael's 'Little Old Lady' - "A little bit of business here, A little bit of business there, Bet that you've been window shopping, All around the square" - when the truth is that most of the time business isn't the reason we're in the town centre. Pryor & Grossbart's list tells a different tale - the town centre is about our social life and our interaction with our neighbours not just about buying washing powder, new shoes or a steak. So if you spend a lot of money making the place look better without thinking about how you're going to get people into town then you're going to be disappointed. Not in the short-term - folk will say that the council is trying with that new pedestrianised bit, with the smart benches, pieces of public art or a water feature - but long-term you need to make your town somewhere that people know is interesting, varied and engaging.

Fred Kent who founded the Project for Public Spaces set out with Kathy Madden from the Social Life Project a series of ways to reinvigorate towns - it's an American perspective so needs caution in applying it to Britain but what's striking is that eight of Kent & Madden's nine suggestions are not about shopping (the ninth is street markets and farmers markets). The focus is on placemaking here and I suspect this will be in the core of the proposals winging their way to Whitehall for a slice of the expected cash bonanza. I don't think this is enough, what we need once we've made a place is a programme for that place, reasons - large and small - for people to visit Mexborough or Keighley or Melton Mowbray. What places need is the impresario, someone - or many people- to programme the events, occasions and activities that will bring the visitors.

Imagine if, instead of quaking in horror at the prospect of hen or stag parties, the town said "we'd love to have you here but come and talk to us first so we can make it a really special day". Think about the town that organised a parade - with a brass band and everything - for the winners of the local junior football league. And think of a place that filled its town with events and activities rather than trying to chase the rainbow by trying to be Shoreditch or The Ramblas. This approach calls for a different style of town centre management - less enforcement and control, more marketing and engagement - and for local authorities of every sort to give more attention to what we do rather than what we build.

My advice, such as it is, for those in government who want to make Britain's towns better is to look beyond infrastructure investment and to consider how we get the revenue in place to support the things that make towns work - good town centre management, well-funded and welcoming public libraries, great community centres, parks and playgrounds, flower beds and clean streets. And to work with those towns to shift them from centres of dull business into places for leisure and pleasure. This means better funding for councils to do these things, backing for BIDs and other innovations in managing centres. Finally, we need to get better marketing into these places, to escape from the deadening tendency to want to be like that super place you visited on your holidays or the funky central London haunt your daughter told you about. Perhaps an Institute for Place Marketing or some such might help by bringing together the best thinking on how to promote towns as destinations.

I appreciate that there are other considerations - better jobs, improving schools, reducing crime - in the agenda for Britain's towns but, if you want the public to see a real improvement then doing something positive about our changing high streets and town centres is imperative. And this starts with us no longer seeing the shop as the driver for town centre success - those libraries, parks, flower beds and band concerts are important too because the centre is a performance space for the town's citizens not just a place of business.

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My speech on Bradford City centre to Politics in the Pub

For those of you who missed last night's Bradford Politics in the Pub event, here is my short speech about the regeneration of our City centre and the Council's current proposals. We were asked "how do we solve a problem like Darley Street?"

"Forgive me for not answering your question. I really do think it’s the wrong question for all that we’re rightly concerned about the future of that street.

It’s more important, I feel, that we think about the longer term, about the future of the high street and the role of City Centres like Bradford.

When big and successful centres like Leeds and Manchester are starting to question the size of their retail footprint – about shrinking the centre, as it were – it seems silly of Bradford to think in a different direction.

The idea that retail alone – or even in large part – can deliver a future city centre is, I fear, delusional. Those things in your pockets and handbags ensure you can buy stuff at the flip of a finger and have it delivered to your door – city centres will never compete with this shopping offer.

We need a different answer. One that works for Bradford.

14 years ago, Bradford asked Will Alsop to provide a city centre master plan. I posted the result – or at least the video that accompanied the plan – on the Politics in the Pub facebook page – if you’ve not seen it, it is easily googled.

Once you got past the teddy bears and blobby architecture, Alsop’s plan was genuinely radical.

So genuinely radical that we ignored it.

Alsop proposed an anti-development masterplan. A completely different take on a city centre. One that played to the uniqueness of Bradford as a place and to the city’s challenges with land values and investment.

Alsop said ‘knock down the ugly stuff, the results of Wardley’s 1960s redesign of the City Centre, and replace it with a park.’

That was pretty much it. For sure there were bits of detail. Some debate about whether there should be no planned new development or just very little.

It’s time for us to look again.

What are centres for?

Here’s a list from American ethnographers Susie Pryor and Sanford Grossbart:

“…dining; window shopping; strolling for relaxation; jogging for health reasons; pub crawls; wine tastings; book clubs; language clubs; craft guilds; charity events; art events; parades; demonstrations; mass celebrations following major sports victories; and meeting friends.”

You might care to add to this list but I do know that, when Bradford City are promoted to the Premiership it won’t be celebrated by buying stuff on Amazon – the flags, parades, banners and beer will be here in the city.

Imagine that in a place that’s like a park? For a fleeting moment Bradford has a glimpse of that dream.

But we put it away. Searched instead for “high value demographics”, “enhanced land values”, and “new investment profiles”. Development bollocks.

Bradford doesn’t have the values right now to deliver shiny retail, grade ‘A’ office space or high quality market housing. So simply moving bits of the city about – fixing Darley Street by shutting down the main generator of footfall in the ‘top of town’ seems to be simply robbing Peter to pay Paul.

So let’s do to the top of town what Alsop told us to do – turn it into a park. A destination. That might just work. It seems right now a better bet than waiting for millions of private investment in housing that probably isn’t going to arrive in Bradford city centre any time soon."

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So what exactly is wrong with Costa Coffee? Why national chains are important to the high street

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Some long while ago the New Economics Foundation wrote a report where they coined the term 'clone town':

The report shows how retail spaces once filled with a thriving mix of independent butchers, newsagents, tobacconists, pubs, bookshops, greengrocers and family owned general stores are fast being filled with faceless supermarket retailers, fast-food chains, mobile phone shops and global fashion outlets. 

The report has been remarkably influential - it combined our like for traditional high streets with something that pretended to be economic analysis. From out of this idea - an a host of subsequent reports - has come a new model for the high street where words like 'sustainable' and 'resilient' abound, and where jolly bunches of community activists and local 'independents' create delightful people-focused places. It is quite idyllic and, if you go to well-healed market towns in Oxfordshire or North Yorkshire you see the model in action.

One such place - in Devon as it happens - is Totnes. I wrote about how the local planning and development agenda has been captured by a group of green activists calling themselves Transition Town Totnes. There was even a petition to the town council setting out local concerns around this capture:

While no one in the Totnes has voted for TTT to dictate town policy, it has enormous influence over town planning policy and the future economic direction of the town. No one in the town voted for TTT to run policy, and it is quite wrong that Totnes Town Council took the unilateral decision to become give us the label of a Transition Town. In fact, if TTT continues to implement its damaging policies it will succeed in turning Totnes centre in a ghost town and make all our lives far more difficult. We want choice, not just TTT's choices.

The whole thing came to a head because Costa Coffee submitted an application to open a coffee shop in the town. There were petitions against signed we're told by 12% of the towns residents as well as by folk from nearby communities like "Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kent, Leeds, London, Manchester, Norfolk, and Surrey, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and even Morocco".

The upshot of all this was that, despite getting its permission (quite rightly since planning is concerned with the use not the ownership), Costa decided not to open up in Totnes. And, as a result, Totnes lacks that little bit extra choice and variety. However, my question is rather to enquire what it is that is so wrong with Costa Coffee that its very presence in a small Devon market town would drag that place down?

The main protagonist here is a chap call Rob Hopkins who believes that his rather peculiar idea of 'resilience' is more important than that pesky thing called choice:

"Choice" is one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie words which can surely only be a good thing, can't it? We all love "choice". It is, of course, ultimately your choice whether you buy your coffee from an independent local business or a chain such as Costa. But would opening a chain in a local economy introduce more choice, or ultimately lead to less? Would it lead to job creation, or to greater job losses, to job displacement? Would the chain support the local bakers, farmers and services that enable more money to cycle locally and give a local economy its robustness?

Here we have the essential argument of the transition town people - that businesses like Costa Coffee don't create jobs and use low cost suppliers from some place other than the 'local' economy (however defined). The idea of resilience - robustness in the quote above - is, for Rob and his pals, predicated on limiting choice through a model of local protectionism. And, of course, as with any form of protectionism, this model results in higher prices and less choice. For high income residents of these market towns such things are affordable but for the poor or unemployed the supposed resilience comes at a cost since they are less able to afford what is on display in the stores as a result of the transition town policies.

I'm not so sure that this argument is right. It rests on two beliefs - that the local multiplier is significant and that substantially more of the money spent in an independent retailer 'cycles locally' as Rob Hopkins puts it. Both of these arguments are open to challenge. Firstly the multiplier, while an important concept in economics, is challenged as a measure in local economics because of leakages and the difficulty of measurement.

There is, however, a more fundamental objection - this is that any benefits from more money staying locally are more than wiped out by the higher prices that results from excluding chain retailers. The New Economics Foundation multiplier model (LM3) doesn't take account of higher prices as it only measures spending downstream. And these higher prices represent an opportunity cost - the consumers' money isn't going into other local spending as they are having to pay those higher prices. A complete assessment would subtact this opportunity cost from the calculated benefits from the LM3 calculation.

The second objection is to the idea that substantially more money remains in the 'local economy' where it is dominated by independents. After cost-of-goods the biggest costs for a retailer are the premises and the employees. We can't assume that the rent is recycled, energy costs certainly leave the local economy as do any repayments on business loans, and there is a significant chunk of taxation (VAT and business rates in the UK). There's nothing to indicate that the employee in a Costa is less likely to spend locally but again most of that employee's costs - tax, rent, energy - leave the local economy.

Finally we need to challenge the idea that "the reweaving of local food webs, community-owned enterprises, a culture of entrepreneurship focused around community resilience" is somehow a stronger local economy than one which is linked with the wider national and international economy. When disaster strikes distributed and networked chains are better able to respond. Here's the example of Wal-Mart after Hurricane Katrina:

It is no accident that Wal-Mart had a strong, measured response in the aftermath of Katrina. Numerous local and state government and law enforcement officials credit the company with providing the first relief efforts in the devastated region, days before Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Red Cross relief operations began.

“Wal-Mart was a lifesaver here in the city of Kenner,” says Phil Capitano, mayor of the New Orleans suburb. “They mobilized and brought food and water when others couldn’t or didn’t know how to get through. They provided anything we asked for when FEMA or no other federal or private organization did. And for that, we are deeply grateful.”

This large business with an international distribution network could respond - had there only been independents such a response simply wouldn't have occurred. And while coffee shops are less important in a disaster than grocery stores, this is a reminder that the approach to 'resilience' promoted by the Transition Towns movement is a false one - not only is it less able to respond to crisis but it is also predicated on higher prices and less choice.

There may be many reasons why Rob Hopkins and his friends don't want to drink in Costa Coffee (although beyond under-strength coffee and bad biscuits I can't think of one) but there is no reason for them to gang together so as to prevent people who might want to drink their coffee in big white cups on an off-centre saucer from doing just that. And suggesting that tourists wandering into Totnes will head to Costa rather than one of the delicious little independent cafes the town is so proud of says very little about those businesses' marketing and service offering (probably unjustifiably).

The 'clone towns' report was important and influential. But we have taken the wrong message away from it especially in a changing retail environment. Since 2005 we've had a massive recession tracked by the explosive growth of on-line buying. As the economy recovers it's unlikely that we will see a return to the sort of high street we saw before 2005. In some ways this is a good thing because we get to treat the town centre as a destination, as a place for events rather than as merely somewhere where we go shopping. But chain restaurants, bars and cafes are just as much part of the future mix as are a variety of creative independents.

Right now the only places that can sustain the sort of retail mix that Totnes is celebrating are either wealthy market towns, posh suburbs or places with a large visitor footfall (and the right sort of visitors). Most places are a very long way from being able to indulge in the slightly snobbish exclusivity that is implied by the Transition Towns idea - indeed many high streets and town centres are more challenged by what to do with a growing number of empty shops (not to mention proliferating betting and borrowing establishments).

Instead of the negative, Stop Costa, Stop Tesco, Stop Wetherspoons, approach places should look to the barriers to new initiatives - setting up bazaars and markets, encouraging busking and peddling, promoting street food and pop-up bars and using the public spaces as a stage for events that help attract people into the town. What we must stop doing is arguing that national businesses damage local economies when there is precious little evidence to make that claim.

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Whose streets and squares are they?

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American streets are not places where ritual, either religious or secular, is easily performed. Only in cloistered communities, set apart from the flows of American life, is this possible, as in the Orthodox Jewish communities of New York and Los Angeles. There, people (importantly) walk to temple, and participate in an “interlocking series” of rituals throughout the Sabbath. During the numerous Great Awakenings in the United States, open space was transformed into religious space through its key ritual, the revival; but this was a temporary transformation, and has not survived in contemporary ritual.

This is a reminder to me that, in much of our nations, we do not own the streets. The streets belong to the government - local or national - and are managed and policed so as to facilitate smooth flow of people and vehicles rather than as a shared space available to all.

I was asked recently what - or rather who - some people needed to contact to hold a little march (or, in this case, a dog walk). I pointed out that they didn't need permission to walk round a public square but that the Council and police would rather they were told about the event. But this is not always so:

Following negotiations with the Metropolitan police, the Greater London Authority and Westminster city council, the organisers of the Time to Act march – which is supported by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, the Stop the War Coalition, Global Justice Now, Avaaz and Friends of the Earth – have been told the police will no longer facilitate the temporary closure of roads along the agreed route.

What we need to understand here is that the police have decided several things - firstly that people cannot walk along the highway, that those highways must be 'closed'; secondly that because of this the people who wish to use the highway need specific permission to do so; and lastly that they must pay for the privilege. The article seems most bothered about the matter of paying but for me this is the smallest of the state's offences here - the real offence is to say that you cannot walk with others along what we used to call the "Queen's Highway" without permission from the agents of government.

I've felt for a long while that the manner in which public authorities control the use of highway represents a persistent restraint on liberty - from banning 'A' boards and street seating through to the hounding of buskers, chuggers and street performers. There's a view - widely held among those who like the idea of 'town centre management' - that only permitted activities should be allowed, that anything loud, lewd or controversial should be stopped and that enforcement of imposed rules is the reason for having that town centre management.

The truth is - as Barbara Ehrenreich observed - is that our authorities have always feared public gathering, whether it's the protest march, the football crowd or simply twenty lads on a stag do.

Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion." Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites.

In the end mankind's gregarious nature wins - we still gather together to celebrate and we share the space of celebration with others who celebrate something else. It's your birthday and you're dragged into town for a good night out. There you'll join folk out celebrating getting engaged, having a new job, leaving an old job, winning a football match and even the mundane fact that it's Friday so no work tomorrow. Sometimes there's something that links us all together, a shared event - watching our team parade the cup round the streets, seeing in the New Year, starting the Christmas season with a light show - but most days the events our private. But they are private events played out in a public place - shared with the world by using the space we all own.

Or so it should be. Ask the preacher who gets arrested because some passer-by was 'offended', the campaigners moved on because they didn't get permission for their stall, or the marchers stopped from making their point to those in power for want of the proper pieces of paper allowing such a protest. Yet political discourse - protest, campaigns, even debate - is as much part of that public place as anything else. In Susie Pryor and Sanford Grossbart's work on the ethnography of America's main street they list the reported activities and politics is right in there - the reasons people go down town:

Other consumers and retailers describe social activities on Main Street, which they associate with a variety of experiences, including dining; window shopping; strolling for relaxation; jogging for health reasons; pub crawls; wine tastings; book clubs; language clubs; craft guilds; charity events; art events; parades; demonstrations; mass celebrations following major sports victories; and meeting friends.

This activity shouldn't need a licence, special permissions or the oversight of police or public guardians - we should let people get on with it, smile at the silliness and enjoy the fact that people are using a shared space to live their lives. After all, whose streets and squares are they?

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How the police waste resources...and then blame the public

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Shock, horror, scandal! One drunk takes 17 - yes, folks one seven, seventeen - coppers to respond. Now leaving aside that I don't believe a word of it, what a waste of resources. This is today's instalment of Chief Constable Adrian Lee's tinpot fascist campaign against people having a good time.

Four policemen to arrest one drunk - two in a patrol car! Aren't the police patrolling the town centre anyway? What this report tells us is that policing in England is a bureaucratic mess and that, under the leadership of men like Mr Lee, the service couldn't manage its way out of a wet paper bag.

Apparently police resources would be better deployed elsewhere:

And those resources would be put to much better use in local communities rather than being called into town centres every weekend to deal with people who wouldn't cause problems if they hadn't consumed so much alcohol

I've really no idea what those "resources" would be doing in "local communities" at midnight on a Friday other that sitting about drinking tea or pointlessly patrolling empty streets. I guess they could use the time to keep up with the paperwork that people like Mr Lee create for them?

Drunken assault is anti-social. But then so is much of the rest of the things police deal with - burglary to feed a drug habit is anti-social, shoplifting is anti-social. In truth all crime is anti-social, the police spend most of their time dealing with people who, for whatever reason, cause problems. It's why we have them, it's what we pay Mr Lee and others to do.

It seems however that, in Mr Lee's world, the problem is with the public not the incompetence of police systems.

Oh and while we're about this - there is no such thing as "24 hour drinking" but since the liberalising of licensing laws alcohol consumption has fallen. Every single year and the biggest fall is amongst the young - the very people Mr Lee blames for the police's bureaucratic uselessness.

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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!

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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.

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Why are 'localists' economically illiterate?

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A while ago I pointed out that the foundation of much 'localist' dogma is something call the regional multiplier and it's pretty dodgy economics:

The problem is that measures of the multiplier do not take account of the input source (i.e. where the money is earned) and that it is very difficult to define what we mean by “local” or “local economy”.

Despite this people continue with their belief that somehow we can get more value from money circulating more in a local economy. This is despite the indisputable fact that the the models proposed by the advocates of independent shops as the solution don't work because the extra value is entirely taken up in higher prices. There is precisely no evidence that shows that preventing more efficient retail systems results in a more successful economy.

Yet off they go - time and time again - with their guffle:

The dominant big brand retail-led town centre model extracts value from places rather than adding value to them.

No they don't - big retailers add value by being more efficient meaning that prices are lower. That allows people to buy things that - under the system beloved of the 'localists' - they would not be able to afford. And then there's all this discussion of 'production' as if that was the point - it's not, we produce stuff for one reason (even though we may absolutely love the production we've involved in). And that reason is because someone wants to consume that production.

Town centres are important - we need to think hard about how to make them work and what tomorrow's town centre will be like. But peddling economic nonsense, proposing an avalanche of new taxes or imposts and judging the choices and preferences of others isn't what's needed.

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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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