The high street is a luxury good.
People in much of England don’t have the disposable income to sustain bijou eateries, funky boutiques and wacky gift shops let alone butchers, greengrocers and fishmongers
Hardly a day passes without somewhere somebody bemoaning the death of the ‘high street’ - the latest featuring the chief executive of John Lewis Group calling for a Royal Commission. In some cases the bemoaners set out exciting ways in which the ‘high street’ can be saved, schemes that almost always combine lashings of taxpayer funding, onerous new taxes on ‘not the high street’ and strict regulations overseen by local councillors, planners and enforcement teams. We get ‘public sector protection orders’ intended to keep the riff-raff out, attempts to restrict betting shops, charity retailing and, increasingly, hairdressers or sweet shops. Places sign up to extra business rates to fund ‘Business Improvement Districts’ (BIDs) that fly the flag for local places now the destruction of genuine local government is almost complete. Thousands of well-meaning articles are written and rooms filled with research of all kinds point to a bewildering set of options and solutions for the high street’s problems. Yet despite all this, stretching back decades, the high street continues to decline almost everywhere.
Back in March last year, Power to Change, the lottery funded social enterprise support body, launched a report on how it thought the high street could be saved. They began with the stark truth:
“A record 16% of shops on Britain’s high streets stand empty and one in every 20 vacant units across the country have been shuttered up for more than three years.”
And, as we all know, the picture is worse than this because those empty shops and windswept empty streets aren’t evenly distributed. And it is Britain’s small towns where we find the brunt of the problem. As Power to Change point out:
“Comparing a sample of 30 English towns with similar-sized high streets, just five had vacancy rates lower than the national average. Whilst 15 have between a fifth (20%) and a third (34.4%) of their high street shops standing empty.”
There is clearly a problem, you might even in these crisis-ridden times call it a crisis. But in talking about the problem, nobody asks why we have a high street. We speak at great length about why the high street is important without, in reality, saying why it is important. In doing this we forget (and Power to Change certainly forget) that the high street isn’t a creation of the state but is a place of exchange, a market. The vibrant high street people hark back to on those Facebook groups that look at old town photographs, was almost entirely a private sector place. The shops, cafes, bars and pubs were businesses and their vanishing is a result of consumer choice not local or national government error.
We all know this truth but still believe that there’s a way to fix the high street by government fiat rather than by having a commercial justification for its existence. We had high streets because people wanted convenient local shops and those high streets declined firstly because public transport allowed people to travel further, then the supermarket piled it high and sold it cheap and people got cars. Then the ‘big box’ retailers arrived doing to fancy goods and the rag trade what Tesco and Sainsbury had done to the corner store and the greengrocer. And all this was before we got to the age of the internet and the arrival of the smartphone. The market’s creativity and innovation gave consumers more choice than they had ever enjoyed with the result that those consumers exercised that choice in their best interests. And the old high street died because it couldn’t compete.
Why do we still have high streets? Back in 2005 Susie Prior and Sandford Grossbart tried to answer the question (at least from an American perspective). Prior, as well as being an academic, part-owns a family store in an American small town so her account of main street’s ethnography was on point. The article sets out a picture of the high 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.”
Back in 2009 I blogged that “we won't go to Tesco when West Ham win the world cup again!”. For me this is the point that Power to Change and others are struggling to get to and it underlines programmes like City of Culture. In the broadest sense of the word, the high street is a performance space where we once marked the events of our lives, large and small. Today those events have retreated to online spaces, to the private home and have become altogether smaller and less public. There are still high streets where what Prior and Grossbart describe takes place but, as that Power to Change report shows us, these are now in the minority.
Thinking about the statistics, it is clear that the reason for the struggle of high streets in towns like Mexborough, Market Rasen and Grimsby relates in large part to economics. The high streets that continue to thrive enjoy one of two features (and ideally both): a high income local population and a significant visitor footfall. There is, I suspect, a virtuous circle here since high income places with a good high street will attract visitors and places popular with visitors are likely to attract high income or net worth residents. The means to get a thriving high street are there but it cannot be done without changing the economic fortunes of the place that the high street serves.
Our problem, and this is seen from the current levelling up programme, is that (as so often is the case) we get the economic horse and cart in the wrong order. Having a traditional high street is a luxury good so spending millions to improve Keighley or Sittingbourne doesn’t work because the fundamentals haven’t changed. The people in those places can’t afford the luxury of a nice high street. I remember talking to a friend in the village about our (award-winning) butcher and his comment was that it was too expensive for him to buy regularly from his groundsman’s wages. For a high street to succeed it needs more people like me and fewer people like my friend. We don’t need high streets in the way we needed high streets in the days before supermarkets, out-of-town shopping and the internet but we do still like the idea of a high street. But, for much of England and especially the North, there simply isn’t enough disposable income to sustain the additional, luxury good, cost of having that thriving, vibrant row of shops.
What we are doing at the moment, sadly, is using regeneration funding to stick a bandage over the problem. We get funding to redo market buildings, to convert old banks into community hubs and to plonk in some fancy paving or street art but none of this resolves the fact that people don’t have the disposable income to sustain the bijou eateries, funky boutiques and wacky gift shops let alone butchers, greengrocers and fishmongers. People will look at their bank account and decide they are going to buy from Amazon, Aldi and B&M rather than the precious independent stores on the old high street. The solution stares us in the face - economic growth - but nobody seems to have any desire to help make that growth real. Unless there’s maybe 20-30% more disposable income in places like Keighley, Oldham or Wolverhampton there is little prospect of getting a thriving town centre. Making those places look nicer, getting a few more community facilities maybe, will merely give the illusion of betterment rather than actually making these places better.
Good article. From what I see, people will always base their decision on a combination of price and convenience when buying products. For most people the High St offers neither of these things. Too expensive as you say, and often requires having to drive in and park if you want to buy something there. If you want to buy a few things, the trade off is worth it, but if you need one item for example, you’ll just go and order it online where they’ll likely have what you want. At the same time, you can go back to whatever you’re doing rather than waste a few hours trying to find a parking space and trawling through shops.
Most of our problems with ‘government’ can be traced to a lack of any historical knowledge. High Streets were on routes linking towns, villages, farms - often with coach inns for stage coach traffic. Dwellings were clustered around the road. People did not have fridges/freezers and had small larders. Food was bought little and often, and people had short distances to walk to the shops. People came in from the countryside for market days, and/or to buy provisions. Life has changed. High Streets are miles away from housing estates, people can bulk shop because they can store food particularly perishable food. It just isn’t convenient or practical to shop having to use public transport or in places where cars are treated like the enemy. The best way to restore High Streets is to convert the commercial premises into dwellings.