Bye-bye High Street

there shd probably be a broader thread for looking at the relationships between producers, merchants/distributors and consumers and the impact of the internet on this, plus the High Street as conceptual and functional space, cos the discussion is scattered over a few different threads, and it's much bigger than individuals' sentimental (trying to use that in a neutral-ish sense) attachment to particular retail brands.

maybe once i've had a better night's sleep tho.

on the other hand.

*is the High Street as retail hub an essential part of urban life?
*does a decentring of retail create better or worse conditions for producers of commodities?
*something something will come back to this later

Reminded to start this thread 48th Street = Desolation Row. Bye-Bye Brick and Mortar Music Stores

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html

that's where i grew up

“Nearly everybody knows everybody else. If you come from outside it’s like walking into a bar in a western,” he said. “Everyone stares.”

reasonable.

Talking of where people grew up, here is one of the lovely fake shops in the High Street where I grew up

http://www.open.edu/openlearn/files/ole/imagine3.jpg

And here's another one:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-e_6UZLYysyY/TVXNDRBhD-I/AAAAAAAAAA0/73H9jo2829Q/s1600/high+street+shops+027.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-l3-CfjpIJDg/TVXZ54r7uVI/AAAAAAAAABc/HiPwzysquKA/s1600/high+street+shops+020.jpg

... imagine being stoned (as many of the denizens of Paisley habitually are) and coming across these

Rugeley town centre - which was never very pretty when I lived there - seems more bleak than ever nowadays. but one of the questions I was thinking about when i started the thread was: if retail is not going to continue to be the mainstay of town centre life, how can we replace it and what should councils do to revive the town centre? these forlorn fake shops pining for a revival that seems ever more unlikely are a joke. and even if there was to be a major cut in town centre rents, would that be enough to change the way people shop? are people being forced into the out of town retail parks and giant supermarkets or is this mostly how they prefer to shop?

Amazon as a force for evil doesn't surprise me in the least. Reading quotes from some of the employees in Rugeley reminds me of reading quotes from Apple employees in China. Even exploitative labour comes as a life-changing improvement to some people in exploitative societies. My kneejerk thought that government has to curb the behaviour of companies like Amazon is immediately countered with the realization that these vermin will always threaten to take their underpaid jobs elsewhere.

Moving on to the Lea Hall section with interest now. Nobody said being a miner was a fun and pleasant job. Which is why they fought so hard to ensure they were fucking well paid for it.

The warehouse is staggeringly huge btw in the context of that little town.

What about having people live in town centres, if they don't want to shop there

that would seem to be one solution to me, too

of course a good percentage of people don't want to live there but you'd think there was probably enough interest in town centre living if it was done right

“Peartree estate was built for the Geordies, the Springfield estate was built for the Scots and the Welsh,” remembered Brian Garner, who helped to build the mine when he was 16.

This is true too, except I don't remember many Welsh kids at school.

Assimilated. I actually did live in Paisley town centre when I was young and it was awesome, then we moved (upmarket) to a council estate, which had no shops, no pubs, next to no public transport etc

When I lived in the town centre, I had a cinema at the end of my street and a massive VIctorian library and art gallery/ museum on my doorstep

The Scottish kids tended to have Midlands-y accents for every day use but wd drop into (what sounded to me as a kid like) thick Scots accents when they talked to each other

i wd love to live in the city centre in Hull if there was suitable accommodation btw

Where's the fake cardboard cutouts of dealers offering jellies in Paisley?

One big issue for town centres is fuck all parking. And what parking there is its not free.

i'd argue that's mostly a bigger question of transport policy. cars need keeping out of town centres. but you need to replace them with something that works better.

also it's not much of a problem if nobody wants to shop there. i see people moan about parking charges but i have my doubts that it's that influential on shopping habits. logistically, putting your big car parks outside of towns makes more sense.

they dont want to end up with the farcical situation in Edinburgh!

i dont drive nor do i do shopping but parking down the town centre is easily the biggest complaint of shoppers where I live. I live in one of the bigger towns of Scotland ,and it spreads over a fair distance so people need cars to access the town centre (and to take said shopping home) and its murder to get parked.
As for transport policy , have a look at the tram system still nor complete in Edinburgh. No council is gonna touch that with a bargepole.

i'm talking about what needs to happen or what ought to happen, not what the murky world of local gov will let happen

Retail will survive in one form or another, the businesses that are going down now are broadly speaking the ones that were doing badly before the crash. There are some things - clothing, furniture and other household objects, that lend themselves better to physical shopping. Plus there's shopping as a leisure activity which I personally don't feel, but that isn't going away even if people have less disposable income.

Whether 'The High Street' is necessarily the best place for that to take place is a different question.

yeah. i don't think the High Street had that long a historical run. certainly in cities like Hull there were a multiplicity of smaller high streets away from the city centre where most shopping was usually done, and before a certain era, let's guess at the 1940s, most shopping wd be done at local corner shops everywhere. shopping as leisure pursuit is a very recent event for most people, and again it doesn't tie to the High Street.

i don't doubt physical retail will continue for a lot of things. like i said upthread, out of town seems in a lot of ways the logistically sensible place for this to happen.

“Peartree estate was built for the Geordies, the Springfield estate was built for the Scots and the Welsh,” remembered Brian Garner, who helped to build the mine when he was 16.

I was speaking to a guy from Doncaster once and he told me there were estates (and schools) for Scots there too

half of Corby ime

Yes but that place is nuts

I think a high street or a cluster of amenities, within walking distance for most residents, is important for neighbourhoods. Like if you look at some of the UK's council estates it's not just disrepair and buy-to-let and all that that's caused problems, but perhaps also that people can be pretty isolated from amenities (like Tom D said of his former estate). Not that it's strictly a council estate problem, because there are even new developments where amenities are completely lacking (e.g. If you look at the urban extension of Upton in Northampton, development's stalled and left the community without the strip of amenities they were supposed to get. It's been a point of criticism for the development which is otherwise considered an example of sustainable community building in the UK). Anyway I guess part of it is if you have a high street/cluster, you'll have people walking on it, you'll have people walking to/from it, and generally it creates a more active environment where people can be watchful of their streets and, theoretically, help deter crime etc. That's before even going into the economic benefits of a high street I guess.

I like Matt's point too, that HMV et al were sort of in trouble already anyway, and there are certain things that are better shopped for IRL. There's still room on high streets for grocery stores and clothes shops and restaurants/cafes/pubs and so many other things. I think for me though it's also important to question the quality of what's on the high street and how well it caters to the community's needs. If it's mostly betting shops and a couple of off-licences it's not going to be benefitting the community very well, imo. It's a difficult mix to get right, because communities themselves can't really control what goes in, local authorities can't really control what goes in, it's just left to market forces. And obv the market forces atm are a complete mess.

sorry for the long post, I was hesitant to post at all because this thread is full of topics I have a lot of opinions/ideas about and I'm not always good at being succinct :)

Inside, hundreds of people in orange vests are pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there.

the ordinary gps satellites give accuracy to within like 50 or 100 m^2 right? it rather gives a sense of the distended dimensions of the place when that is still a useful metric

One street in Hackney, east London, has eight betting shops and concerns have been raised in Southall, west London, where there are 18.

For planning purposes, they are classified as providing "financial services".

That means, if a bank branch closes, a betting shop can sometimes open on the premises unchallenged.

i was going to say that those Imagine... shops would be more realistic if they were betting shops or starbucks

in hammersmith they've just opened a betting cafe...

when TV is hourly inviting mug punters to install bandits on their phones i'm surprised brick and mortar bookies are thriving. they have so roulette machines in or something tho i guess?

“Six Sigma”, the Motorola-developed method of operational improvement

^^chilling endtimes phrases

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/PDCA-Two-Cycles.svg/450px-PDCA-Two-Cycles.svg.png

Roulette machines are amazingly profitable. The proliferation of betting shops is largely driven by the money they generate. Each shop is limited to about six machines, I think, so they open up two or three sites in the same street to get around the regulations.

i figured it was the roulettes. what are they offering that the traditional high street arcades don't? bigger imaginary jackpot?

The maximum stake is £100 iirc which is much higher than arcade machines traditionally had. Not sure if the arcade limit has changed though.

About amenities providing a sense of community. You know British greasy spoon cafes?

I was once talking about how much I like them. Someone said that was sentimental. I blurted out 'No, it's physical', and felt like a pseud, but I really do think there's something to that, down to the sugar, fat, voice sounds you get in them, like you're 'feeding' on this stuff not just in the sense of eating and drinking it but it actually replenishing you mentally. Equipped to deal then with cold and concrete. And not like, a respite - a quirky cafe playing folk music and full of people on laptops wouldn't provide the same thing.

The area where I live in SE London won a grant to promote the establishment of various pop-up shops and it's had a visible effect. Virtually every other shop on the road I live on was empty at one point and most of them are occupied now* (and pretty fucking twee but that's beside the point) but that's obviously not going to work on a big town centre High Street mostly owned by massive property companies and high retail rents as a result. Like much of what's wrong with the UK, rent is a big part of the problem.

(*We still have a payday loans company situated directly opposite the betting shop, depressingly)

£100 sounds an awful lot considering the sort of people who patronize highstreet betting shops

Matt DC it's a Portas Pilot area isn't it?
Kind of wondering now how many of those twee shops are from ppl who couldn't afford the rents on North Cross Road/Lordship Lane (that might be a stupid thing to say, but I'm curious about what extent East Dulwich's gentrification has affected surrounding areas, I guess)

Yeah it's a Portas Pilot thing, although I'm sure that East Dulwich overspill and an influx of grown-up hipsters attracted by the Orange Line have certainly had an effect. It was pretty desolate along some roads even 18 months ago though.

Like, I'm aware there wouldn't be the same effect in Bolton.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/mar/29/high-street-closed-betting-shops-york-back-from-dead

That photo is the spit of New land Avenue, five minutes from my house - another street hanging in there with a reasonable range of different shops.

Fucking bunting everywhere though.

York’s premier shopping strip, Coney Street, where 20% of units lie empty.

Try Crystal Palace where I swear it's nearer a third.

Dewsbury has to be seen to be believed, it must be top 5 in in the empty units charts. Some of the decaying empty units are covered in mountains of birdshit and look like they'd need multiple fumigations before ever being fit for human purpose again. But then bucking the trend, there is a Herbalist business and a odd time travel clothes shop that are still going and have been there since the 1850's.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/dec/06/dont-save-the-high-street-change-it-completely-says-retail-guru-mary-portas

Were it not for the potential job losses, she would be singing good riddance to the dinosaurs of retail. Portas is focused on what she has dubbed “the kindness economy”, wherein she forecasts growth for high streets with an overarching philosophy that involves some kind of contribution to making life better. But what will this translate to?

Far fewer shops selling actual goods apparently, and a far stronger focus on the experiential side of things – a catch-all that takes in everything from escape rooms and nail salons, to restaurants and street performers.

Covid-19 has crystallised a social and economic movement that has been bubbling under this past decade,” says Portas. “We’ve seen mass introspection and a re-examination of how we live and want to live. Globally, 77% of people now say they value decency in business as much as price and convenience

This is sort of moving in the direction of making the right noises, if you ignore the bit about escape rooms and street performers, but feels wildly optimistic / unrealistic - akin to the predictions the death of the record industry would lead to a boom in independent music.

if people really valued decency then nobody would drink in a Wetherspoons or shop in Primark or Sports Direct

also interested in how good an "experience" shops can offer when the story on the high street is of staffing levels being cut to the very bare minimum over the past ten years. Personalised 1-2-1 shopping assistance is a lovely idea (for some people, personally I couldn't care) but the reality is an 18-yr-old on minimum wage being expected to run between multiple customers and keep the place tidy.

i wouldn't expect real insight from somebody who seems as uninterested in the mechanics of capitalism as Mary Portas

Didn't she have some role in revitalising the highstreet during the Cameron/Clegg administration which completely fizzled out? Her main focus always seems to be promoting brand Portas.

without anything done to temper capitalism, the best case scenario for high streets is luxury flats + occasional chain coffee shop / tesco express, alternatives are even more grim.

think at this point the charity shops / poundland / Gregg's / cash converters high streets aren't sustainable

Many High Streets have been like that for over a decade, so maybe it is sustainable.

I'm trying to remember when the High Street in Paisley wasn't charity shops / poundland / Gregg's / cash converters.

I've noticed a few of these (especially the charity shops) closing due to increased rent

It's been like that for a decade but becoming gradually less busy so it's probably unsustainable and covid accelerated it.

I had some (idealised, probably forlorn) hope that covid lockdown would lead to some longer term thinking about the benefits of home working, decentralising away from big cities, spreading wealth, housing, etc. which would lead to fewer chains, more local production and consumption and some kind of high street revival at least at service level.
But everyone will get vaccined up and head back to Starbucks and Pret in the big smoke.

Yeah, can't wait to learn no lessons from this pandemic

I mean tbf i guess the key lesson is that what people want has little impact on what they get. Hard to say exactly how many folks like it that way

(xxp) You are definitely not alone there, onimo!

I wonder what’s going to happen to the development under way for the last couple of years in my area - and countless like it - of massive mixed-use flats and retail space. They’ve levelled acres of prime land, relocated the train station, permanently shuttered half a street of shops and - what are they meant to build now?

This is Newcastle:

Thank god they knocked down the Greenmarket to make space for a massive Debenhams and Topshop, companies that will be around forever while goodwill for small local business is at an all time low! Someone at the council must have a crystal ball!

— Rebecca (@rebeccarrrr) December 1, 2020

Birmingham:

a debenhams connects the bullring and grand central in birmingham, two retail projects the council centred regeneration around with a big hole in the middle

— phoon (@weirdfigs) December 2, 2020

Newport sold off land cheap, underwrote rents and loans for a Debenhams that was meant to rejuvenate the whole area.

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UqOvr-AG8ug/VQWZ3XDyyAI/AAAAAAAAD40/Wwwx8D86-hs/s1600/Store%2BWars%2B1%2BWC%2B05%2BSep%2B1981.jpg

as was foretold by one of the great prophets decades ago.

I reckon hiring cats as retail security guards would be pretty rad tbf!

Xxp Lol croydon

cats are notoriously slow to unionize, which definitely makes them attractive to recruiters.

I can see the paws abilities, also they are notoriously easy to negotiate with - and will happily accept out of date sardines in place of salmon.

It's now in my headcanon that the store owner in the second panel is the father or Mr Superstore

Mr Superstore Begins

I've noticed a few of these (especially the charity shops) closing due to increased rent

― Gary Sambrook eats substantial meals (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Sunday, December 6, 2020 1:17 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Am I wrong, or is the explosion of chazzers lately something to do with landlords bunging them into vacant properties so they don't have to pay business rates if they have a registered charity renting the space? Not sure why they'd be making the rents unsustainable though, maybe a precursor to selling to developers? Truly the mind of a landlord is a festering swamp of evil intentions.

xp lol