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.

.....

Our urban policy is based on snobbery - time to change.

"Oh god we're going to get absolutely dreadful urban policy for five years, all targeted at the awful Britain of out-of-town shopping centres, massive car parks, Frankie and Bennys and giant cinemas"

This Tweet from Daniel Knowles, a journalist at the Economist who, as far as I know, lives in London, sums up everything that is wrong with the snobbish, anti-suburb urban policy beloved of planners and politicians trapped in Le Corbusier's planned, controlling city fetish. I'm sure we're not far away from a reference to agglomeration theory and extended quotations from Michael Porter and Richard Florida.

What strikes me most about this comment is the shamelessness of its snobbery. It's not that Knowles is simply criticising urban policies that reflect the realities of lives in towns across the UK but that he does so in the manner of somebody fishing out a soiled pair of someone else's knickers from the bottom of the laundry basket.

Some things, however, bear repeating again and again and one of them is that over 90% of journeys are done on roads and most of those are done in private cars. Railways, trams and other fixed line systems really don't provide a genuine alternative to the private car. We can shift a few people onto these systems where they track busy routes but they can never match the complexity of urban travel patterns. Buses are better but even then, given operating costs, it's difficult for a bus network to fully track the dispersed nature of travel.

In Knowles' world the answer is to deny people the flexibility of private transport - something less problematic for the city-dwelling wealthy than it is for the small town and suburban working- and middle-class. This restriction is justified by an anti-car ideology underpinned by an elitist disdain for the lives of these ordinary people. What does it matter, think such folk, if those people in small towns and suburbs can't get to out-of-town shops or cheap eateries the way they can now.

Given that the direction of technological travel for transport is towards zero emission vehicles, autonomous and digitally-enabled systems it still confuses me why we're so stuck in that early 20th century Le Corbusier model of urban containment and mass transit. These technological changes demand a different transport ideology, one that recognises dispersed populations, complex travel networks and human autonomy. The problem is caught in the snobbishness of the anti-suburb world view - these places are dullsville, filled with dreary people leading boring lives involving giant cinemas, chain restaurants and out-of-town shopping with big car parks.

The problem for these metropolitan snobs is that you can't base your national urban policy solely on a sneering dislike for towns and suburbs. So such people subborn the environment, friend to the NIMBY, as justification for an anti-car, inflexibility. The snobbishness is wrapped up as caring for the planet and allows arguments for more railways (which the visitors to out-of-town shops, big cinemas and Frankie and Benny's seldom, if ever, make us of) to dominate transport debate. It defeats me why this is the case since simple maths says this is the wrong strategy - if nineteen out of twenty journeys are on roads even doubling rail capacity barely scratches the surface of demand, assuming that we've built a rail system that meets actual journey needs.

Yes we need better transport systems, yes we need better urban policy but if what we get is elitist snobbery wrapped up in greeny-greeny saving the planet then it is not going to work and, worse, means ordinary people doing ordinary journeys in their ordinary lives will be made to pay more because those snobs don't like big car parks at out-of-town cinemas. These are the sort of people who don't like Christmas house bling - these are not good people.

.....

Privatise town centres? A thought on reading The Portas Review

In her statement of “vision”, Mary Portas gets it about right:

“I want to put the heart back into the centre of our high streets, re-imagined as destinations for socialising, culture, health, wellbeing, creativity and learning.”

OK so it’s a little bit gushing (this is a TV ‘expert’ after all) but above all Ms Portas recognises that the future of the town centre doesn’t lie with retailing. Except that the entire report focuses on retailing, rolling out the same set of solutions that have failed in a myriad of places. “Town Teams” were a feature of Yorkshire Forward’s ‘Renaissance market towns’ projects – arrogantly shoving aside existing groups, town councils, district and county councillors and shipping in ‘experts’ from elsewhere who proposed stupid things that divided towns.

The Panel welcomes the idea of bringing together a fresh group of people to generate ideas for the visioning and Master Planning process. The Panel considers, though, that lead consultants have misinterpreted the flexibility of this approach and this has led to a lack of consistency in how Town Teams are set up and a lack of clarity regarding their role, remit, and how they relate to existing democratic structures. This ambiguity has caused considerable conflict in a number of towns.

All this gets back to the advantage that shopping malls have over town centres – single ownership – and setting up a town team, however this is done, doesn’t address that problem. Yet the reality of most town centres is that most of the land is in a single ownership – the local council. But that this owner doesn’t treat it as such preferring instead to see it as a collection of unrelated activities – roads, parks, markets, theatres, sports halls and office blocks.

Ms Portas wants town centres run “like businesses”:

“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.”

Hence the town team, ‘business improvement districts’ and other similar initiatives. This isn’t a radical solution to decline in the town centre (less so when you couple it with proposals for more planning controls on out-of-town developments), it’s just a repeat of using “pseudo-business” structures to try and ape what happens in the mall and the supermarket. Remember the Urban Regeneration Company, what of town centre management companies and a bewildering variety of special purpose vehicles aimed at “regenerating” town centres.

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.

Into this approach can be build structures akin to business improvement districts. Councils can be flexible on business rates. And can no longer use parking as a cash generator for the pothole repair fund.

Town centres are not about retail any more, they are about a place of interest, engagement and excitement – and the best of these places, as Mary Portas demonstrates again and again in her report, are privately-owned, privately-managed and run for profit.

 It's a thought...

....