The Doughnut Effect

The English town centre with its curving High Street, ancient inns, cafes, restaurants, offices, fashion chains and bustling street market is an enduring image. 2010 was the year when Amazon sold more books on Kindle, its portable e – book reader, than paper- backs. It was  also  the year when retail changes that had been gaining momentum for more than two decades, finally exerted a conspicuous visual impact on the appearance of the High Street. The Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency, announced that building societies, recruitment agencies, estate agents and pubs were disappearing from the High Street. The only category to see significant growth were High Street betting shops. Also evident was demand from discount pound shops, and pawnbrokers, demonstrating the impact of wealthier shoppers driving to out – of – town retail parks and shopping malls. In the United States this is known as the “doughnut effect “, as shoppers migrate to out -of -town, leaving a boarded -up hole in the town centre.

The Latin Quarter

For those town centres that have attractive historic buildings, the future is to become the Latin Quarter to a successful city centre or regional shopping centre, to accommodate the niche fashion boutiques, speciality shops, restaurants and cafes which prefer to be away from the national chains. Examples which spring  to mind are Eton the Latin Quarter to Slough, Henley on Thames playing a similar role  to Reading. Other examples are  Solihull – a Latin Quarter to Birmingham and Alderley Edge equally playing this role  to Manchester. For many other town centes the future is depressingly bleak, and even the future of superstores is not  assured as  shopping for groceries on line was forecast by the research group IGD to have increased to more than 25% by 2014.

 

Mary Queen of Shops

Confronted by these changes, David Cameron when Prime Minister, borrowed Gordon Brown`s habit of appointing high –  profile TV stars to solve the nation`s problems. He asked Mary Portas, the shopping guru, famous through TV shows such as Mary Queen of Shops, to carry out a government –  backed review to try and halt the decline of the high street. Announcing the appointment the then Prime Minister said “ The high street should be at the very heart of every community, bringing people together, providing essential services and creating jobs and investments; so it is vital that we do all that we can to ensure they thrive.”

 

The Portas Report

Too much was expected of her report published in December 2011.Despite her reputation for being outspoken, her recommendations were somewhat underwhelming. Much of the report focused on making yet more changes to the planning system, so as to create a presumption in favour of town centre development whilst resisting more out – of – town development. Surprisingly she under-estimated the continuing impact of the internet on shopping behavior.”Great shopping means you don’t need to buy off the internet” , she told Property Weekly when interviewed. But by the time the report was published at the end of 2011, the recession that had begun in 2008, had stalled many out – of – town shopping schemes, and subsequently few have been built since;  effectively side –  lining one of her major recommendations.

Other reflections on the Portas report included this by columnist  Janet Street-Porter:  “ Why don`t we stop trying to save the high street and turn it into something different such as low –cost  housing with community facilities ? People on low incomes like malls and chains – the staff don`t patronize them. It`s only the middle classes who care about high streets. If we want to save them, we`ve got to shop there – and most of us can`t be bothered.”

There is a large grain of truth in what she says. The Latin Quarter model of town centres will undoubtedly survive, as will the traditional “ street market” high street found in many low – income areas. Stuck in the middle are the many  town centres which have seen  shop closure after shop closure since Mary Portas reported in 2011,  with no sign of recovery.

A sense of place

Most of the reports published in the past decade have called for major intervention by central and local government to arrest the decline of the high street. But central government preoccupied by Brexit and (on the domestic front) trying to engineer a massive increase in house building can offer little more than business rate relief and planning reform.The government announcement that communities across the country can bid for up to £50,000 to help make local areas more attractive was welcome but much greater innovation is needed. Local Government does not have the capacity nor influence. A typical shire district council may have as many as ten market towns in its administrative area, and resourcing professional support for all of these towns would be a huge challenge. The answer is that the high street has to help itself. Success, as we have seen at Morpeth and Stamford, comes from collaboration between local town councils and the business community to create a sense of place, which not only attracts shoppers and visitors, but persuades developers that the high street is a place worth investing in. High streets can be re-imaged in the bricks and clicks era. Neither is a substitute for the other as shoppers migrate between the two shopping experiences.