Somewhere between the end of Woolworths and the shuttering of Topshop, the realisation should have dawned. Our retail-dominated high streets are dying. Depending on where you grew up, if you go back to parades you prowled as a teenager, you will see half-empty charity shops and perhaps an empty concrete husk of a BHS.
It is market forces that have done this, namely our online shopping habits, which have accelerated during the pandemic. But we cannot leave the market to decide what comes next. High streets matter too much. They define the character and identity of our towns and neighbourhoods. They are spaces that should bring us together and engender civic pride. To save them we need to look to the past, when the town hall, the music hall, the church and the guildhall all had their place in the centre of our towns. We need to rebuild the civic high street.
As a first step, we need to change how decisions are made about the future of high streets: many more local interests must be involved—local government, the NHS, community organisations. Business improvement districts, which levy local firms to invest in things that encourage local commerce, should evolve to become community improvement districts, giving voices beyond business a say in how town centres evolve, and drawing levies from beyond the business community too.
We don’t have to wait for legislation: this evolution is already happening on Saracen Street in Possilpark, Glasgow. The area has been in decline since the closure of its largest employer in the 1960s. The CID has broadened the district’s aims beyond simple commercial viability to consider wider local economic development and wellbeing, with social housing providers and voluntary organisations now sitting alongside local businesses. Other local authorities should follow suit.
Next, we urgently need to move more high street property into the hands of those with a long-term interest in the stewardship and curation of place. Too much is currently left to remote owners who do not care how—or even whether—their space is used. Union Street in Plymouth illustrates the problem: long depressed, it was littered with empty properties, each with a different owner. It has taken Nudge Community Builders, a community business, to imagine a new high street and—crucially—to acquire the empty properties and put vision into practice. Midsteeple Quarter is pulling off a similar trick in Dumfries.
The government proposes “permitted development” rights to allow struggling commercial landlords to flip their properties into housing, but this will only make such stewardship more difficult and further threaten the viability of town centres. Instead, government should seize the opportunity brought about by the pandemic to create a shift in ownership, by creating a town centre buyout fund to swoop in when businesses fail. Over time, this can transfer properties to local owners.
We also need to open up empty properties to the independent businesses which can bring vitality back. We are already seeing light industrial workshops, tool and gadget libraries, local workspaces and community arts centres filling empty shops. These new high street uses will restore pride—as well as footfall. Empty Dwelling Management Orders allow councils to put empty residential properties back into use. Extend them to cover long-empty commercial property, and councils would be empowered to support local and social businesses by offering them prime commercial real estate on favourable terms.
In fact, it is only if you measure the vitality of the high street by chain retail that you could conclude there is anything inevitable about its demise. The pandemic has given us a chance to reimagine town centres as civic spaces, updating the high street model of the 1920s for the 2020s.
