The death knell has been sounded many times for the British high street, but it is currently undergoing perhaps its toughest test since it first emerged in the towns and cities of Victorian Britain. Rises in business rates and rents, the growth of online shopping and the rise of giant retail centres have led to store closures and sent some retailers into receivership.
Earlier this year House of Fraser and Marks & Spencer announced that they will be closing dozens of stores. Some well-known chains such as Next and New Look are using Company Voluntary Arrangements (CVAs) to reduce rent bills and hasten the closure of unprofitable stores. This will add to the toll of closures on high streets still reeling from the economic downturn. In 2016, more than 6,000 shops closed across the UK. Meanwhile Mary Portas’s “Save the High Street” campaign has been branded as an expensive PR exercise, with the rate of decline in shops in its featured towns being around the same as that of the rest of the country. All this has helped create what has become known in the US as a “doughnut effect”, in which shoppers migrate from the town centre to the periphery.
More Than Shopping
But all is not lost. There are shards of light in this gloomy picture. High streets that have shown flexibility, adaptability and imagination have bucked the trend, attracting new retailers and shoppers to previously moribund and boarded-up areas. According to a report in the consumer magazine Which?, high streets can do this by attracting new types of retail destination such as “concept stores”, where shoppers can watch product demonstrations or try out for themselves electronic devices, furniture or kitchen gadgets. London’s Wigmore Street has a KitchenAid London Experience Store and Showroom, where you can watch free demos of the kitchen gadget company’s appliances, and take part in a cookery class. “Experiential” is the new word in retailing – shoppers want more than a product; they want an experience.
An Unquenchable Thirst for Coffee
Another factor in reviving high streets is the independent coffee shop. The number of coffee shops and cafés of all kinds is still rising, as the British show an apparently unquenchable thirst for coffee, and this goes for the independent sector, too. As of 2016 there were 22,845 coffee shops in the UK, up 6 per cent year on year, according to a report from Allegra World Coffee Portal. While the big coffee shop brands such as Costa Coffee continue to expand, smaller chains are also seeing a sales boom, the report says. These are helping to make the high street a social hub, a place for people to meet and chat and shop. This process is helped by the rise of retailers such as hair and beauty salons, nail bars and vape shops. Indeed, the independent sector as a whole is growing: figures from business research analysts LDS show that the number of independent retail outlets in the UK has risen.
Social ownership and social enterprises could become a key part of high street regenerations. It’s been suggested that empty retail properties could be reopened as community centres or day centres for the elderly. Pubs could open up in old retail premises, and indeed the micro-pub movement has seen a nationwide emergence of pubs in local premises that were once butchers’ shops, hairdressers and suchlike.
Some of the revitalised high streets contain a cinema – another sector that has bucked the trend of decline. Arthouse and independent cinemas are thriving and adding to the mix of cultural and retail outlets in today’s high streets. For many years, Crouch End in north London didn’t have a cinema – now it has two, the Arthouse and the Picturehouse; the Arthouse is located in a former Salvation Army hall.
Meanwhile, one of the curses of the current high street is the ubiquitous charity shop, which in some cases seem to have taken over too much of the retail space. But the charity shop has been rethought with the opening in Manchester of Goodstock, a “pre-loved” store that sells secondhand clothes, books, DVDs and accessories in a cool, friendly environment. It is staffed by trained volunteers, and proceeds go to charity.
Sticky Streets
Meanwhile simple tricks can make an area that was once somewhere to hurry through into a place to linger: placing pianos on the street that passers-by can play creates a sense of fun and brings people together. The key is to create a high street that is “sticky” – a term coined by the Canadian urban planner Brent Toderian. He’s not talking about chewing gum on the pavements, but about getting people to stick around rather than just move through. His ideas include providing better lighting, more shade, improved road crossings, prioritising pedestrians over cars, and installing bike racks. The presence of retail outlets such as cafés, bars and restaurants will in itself create a high street that is more “sticky”.
Prizewinning High Streets
Every year since 2014, the High Street of the Year awards have singled out winners from towns and cities across the country in various categories. The picture that emerges is one of a fightback. In 2015, the winner in the local category was Bishopthorpe Road in York (or Bishy Road, as it is known locally). A street that was once under threat of demolition to make way for a dual carriageway has reinvented itself as a thriving hub, with excellent restaurants and cafés, a bike shop, a deli, small supermarkets, a pub and a butcher. Most of these are independent. A key moment in the regeneration of the street came when local retailers got together and branded themselves under a single website. They then held a street party which attracted 3,000 people.
The overall High Street of the Year award in 2016 was won by Blackburn, a process that began with £40 million from the UK government and the EU that was used to spruce up the town centre and create the new Cathedral Cloister area; also heritage funding was used to restore historic buildings.
In that same year, Falmouth won the Coastal Community award; the Cornwall town had the lowest shop vacancy rate in the south-west.
Derby’s Day
Also in 2016, the winner in the City Location category was Derby’s Cathedral Quarter. Here, the emphasis was on the area’s heritage and sense of tradition. With money from the City Council and Historic England, unattractive modern shopfronts were removed and replaced with traditional-looking facades, sometimes using photographs from the early 1900s as reference, harking back to what many see as the heyday of the British high street – the Edwardian era. Many of the retailers who have moved into the area – creating near-100 per cent occupancy – are independent. Among them is the Bear Café, a new independent arrival that serves coffee and food as well as drinks and cocktails, in simple, modern surroundings. Tiles, wood and café furniture upholstered in subtle colours create a warm, spacious environment. The Bear also runs coffee appreciation courses, tapping into consumer demand for “experiences”.
In the awards’ Small Market Town category, Hebden Bridge was the winner in 2016, receiving a record 40,000 votes for its attractive mix of local independent cafés, shops and pubs. It was also a reward for the way the town bounced back following the Boxing Day floods of 2015.
The future of British high streets remains a difficult one, with too many shops boarded up, and a handful of chains dominating many a parade of shops. But with imagination, belief, good planning, and of course money, the decline of the British high street could be halted – and even reversed.