The UK government is talking about "reviving high streets".
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The UK government is talking about "reviving high streets".
I don't go the town centre very often, as there is little that draws me to it. Coffee shops, charity shops, barbers shops. And, okay, a lovely indie board game shop, but I don't buy board games regularly.
My feeling is that a "high street", or "town centre", is an anachronism?
At least, I don't know what would have to change about our town centre, for me to want to go.
High streets revived and children given safe places to play
New initiative will support local areas to reimagine and revive their struggling high streets
GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
I am fortunate that I can cycle to town in just a few minutes, and that I need to be on a road for only 100m or so. The rest is on cycle paths.
Decent covered bicycle parking would be nice, but in itself is not an attraction. More a hygiene factor.
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The UK government is talking about "reviving high streets".
I don't go the town centre very often, as there is little that draws me to it. Coffee shops, charity shops, barbers shops. And, okay, a lovely indie board game shop, but I don't buy board games regularly.
My feeling is that a "high street", or "town centre", is an anachronism?
At least, I don't know what would have to change about our town centre, for me to want to go.
High streets revived and children given safe places to play
New initiative will support local areas to reimagine and revive their struggling high streets
GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
@neil Years ago, people used to get their ordinary shopping in high streets. Then councils allowed companies to build massive out-of-town and edge-of-town-centre supermarkets with large car parks. That was the start of the decline, and has been gradually happening over the last 40 years. These places have also massively undercut the prices that the small shops that remain can afford to charge. High streets are now ghost places in many places. Of course, it happened in the US first...
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The UK government is talking about "reviving high streets".
I don't go the town centre very often, as there is little that draws me to it. Coffee shops, charity shops, barbers shops. And, okay, a lovely indie board game shop, but I don't buy board games regularly.
My feeling is that a "high street", or "town centre", is an anachronism?
At least, I don't know what would have to change about our town centre, for me to want to go.
High streets revived and children given safe places to play
New initiative will support local areas to reimagine and revive their struggling high streets
GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
@neil I'm not sure it's an anachronism, in that a high street as it was would be quite appealing, but there aren't many places where that can exist. It'd require a combination of no supermarket or home delivery grocery coverage, fairly affluent residents and for that situation to have been constant over time.
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@neil well I guess social places, like pubs (which may not interest everyone).
Oddly enough this is exactly when business rates have come back and hit a number of local pubs with totally impossible figures (like £75k pa) for one place. Running a pub is incredibly difficult, and the one I know is just under the floor area, thankfully, as even a few thousand in rates would shut them down.
It is not like they get much for those rates, not even the bins emptied!
@revk Newbury is littered with coffee shops. One every 20m, perhaps! So no lack of paid social spaces.
Places where people can meet without having to pay would be nice.
We have a park, which is lovely in summer, and benches by the canal, and also quite a lot of green spaces outside the centre, so in summer, it is not too bad. In winter, options are meagre.
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I am fortunate that I can cycle to town in just a few minutes, and that I need to be on a road for only 100m or so. The rest is on cycle paths.
Decent covered bicycle parking would be nice, but in itself is not an attraction. More a hygiene factor.
@neil bakeries with extremely tasty products?
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@neil I'm not sure it's an anachronism, in that a high street as it was would be quite appealing, but there aren't many places where that can exist. It'd require a combination of no supermarket or home delivery grocery coverage, fairly affluent residents and for that situation to have been constant over time.
> a high street as it was would be quite appealing
I'm far from sure!
It might provide a novelty, in a sort of "town from a postcard" kind of way, but more than that seems unlikely to me.
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The UK government is talking about "reviving high streets".
I don't go the town centre very often, as there is little that draws me to it. Coffee shops, charity shops, barbers shops. And, okay, a lovely indie board game shop, but I don't buy board games regularly.
My feeling is that a "high street", or "town centre", is an anachronism?
At least, I don't know what would have to change about our town centre, for me to want to go.
High streets revived and children given safe places to play
New initiative will support local areas to reimagine and revive their struggling high streets
GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
@neil things I would like to buy locally but can't (no shops or little choice):
- bicycle parts
- records/CDs
- electronics bits
- computer components
- gardening tools
Things I prefer to and can buy locally:
- hardware (nuts, bolts, tools)
- motorbike accessories
- coffee
- books
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The UK government is talking about "reviving high streets".
I don't go the town centre very often, as there is little that draws me to it. Coffee shops, charity shops, barbers shops. And, okay, a lovely indie board game shop, but I don't buy board games regularly.
My feeling is that a "high street", or "town centre", is an anachronism?
At least, I don't know what would have to change about our town centre, for me to want to go.
High streets revived and children given safe places to play
New initiative will support local areas to reimagine and revive their struggling high streets
GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
@neil town centres are nice to wander around, often some of the little shops there can be fascinating.
But the price of parking, and the price and increasing scarcity of public toilets, is very offputting. If councils don't want their town centre to die they have to make it easier for people to get to them.
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@neil bakeries with extremely tasty products?
@DanielRThomas Would appeal to some, I'm sure!
Enough to get me into town? No, at least not more than once in a blue moon.
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I am fortunate that I can cycle to town in just a few minutes, and that I need to be on a road for only 100m or so. The rest is on cycle paths.
Decent covered bicycle parking would be nice, but in itself is not an attraction. More a hygiene factor.
@neil fresh food shops, library, pharmacy and chemists, and pretty much every sort of shop, all with good transport links and no need to walk long distances across tarmac wastelands with no shelter. Seems like a good idea to me.
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@neil Years ago, people used to get their ordinary shopping in high streets. Then councils allowed companies to build massive out-of-town and edge-of-town-centre supermarkets with large car parks. That was the start of the decline, and has been gradually happening over the last 40 years. These places have also massively undercut the prices that the small shops that remain can afford to charge. High streets are now ghost places in many places. Of course, it happened in the US first...
@UkeleleEric @neil out of town supermarkets are stores of abused food. You can survive off it if you must, but it's not really living.
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I am fortunate that I can cycle to town in just a few minutes, and that I need to be on a road for only 100m or so. The rest is on cycle paths.
Decent covered bicycle parking would be nice, but in itself is not an attraction. More a hygiene factor.
We tend to do our food shopping weekly. We plan in advance, and cook in batches. We minimise food waste, conveniently. We schedule a delivery for a time that suits us, and can shop when we want.
Is a high street with a butcher, baker, greengrocers, grocers, chemist etc going to be open during "normal working hours" (I.e. when most people are working?), or open when more people are able to visit? Or are they weekend-only affairs?
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The UK government is talking about "reviving high streets".
I don't go the town centre very often, as there is little that draws me to it. Coffee shops, charity shops, barbers shops. And, okay, a lovely indie board game shop, but I don't buy board games regularly.
My feeling is that a "high street", or "town centre", is an anachronism?
At least, I don't know what would have to change about our town centre, for me to want to go.
High streets revived and children given safe places to play
New initiative will support local areas to reimagine and revive their struggling high streets
GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk in the 60s (which is when conscious life began) there were already chains of shops, for example, a lot of towns had a Dewhursts butcher, or a Boots chemist, etc. In about the 70s and 80s the idea of an even bigger entity than a supermarket took hold and things like B&Q appeared but in a ‘retail park’ sort of area, where people had to actually travel to rather than walk to, and this sort of thing increased and sucked out the facility of supplying the same. Imagine if B&Q were banned from being so big, and were forced to be ‘on the high street’. It’d put the hardware shop back on the high street, so you could go and get your paint mixed just like in the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever, when Tony Manero’s boss Fusco tells him “No, Tony! You can't fuck the future. The future fucks you. It catches up with you and it fucks you if you ain't planned for it!”. That sort of hardware shop is almost extinct now.
One of the anachronistic almost laughing stock scenarios was the clinging on by fingernails of Maplin, who supplied fairly good stuff eventually mixed in with a sea of toys, but seemed to completely deny the possibility that people are ordering electronic parts from China and waiting the time it took for an order to turn up. Back in the days of ‘the high street’, this was not a sensible or feasible option, it would be ludicrous to buy a bunch of diodes from China and wait a month for them, it wouldn’t add up, it wouldn’t be cheaper, why do it.
The way to get a functioning ‘high street’ is to prevent B&Q and suchlike from being so big and so nationwide and stop them from not being based in a high street, and also to prevent ordering crap from China from being feasible. -
The UK government is talking about "reviving high streets".
I don't go the town centre very often, as there is little that draws me to it. Coffee shops, charity shops, barbers shops. And, okay, a lovely indie board game shop, but I don't buy board games regularly.
My feeling is that a "high street", or "town centre", is an anachronism?
At least, I don't know what would have to change about our town centre, for me to want to go.
High streets revived and children given safe places to play
New initiative will support local areas to reimagine and revive their struggling high streets
GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
@neil I live near a fantastic high street (Gloucester Rd, Bristol). It's a mixture of independent and small-chain businesses plus the odd national (Sainsbury's Local, Co-Op, one Costa amongst many independents). Outside of new clothes, hobbies, furniture, or major DIY, you can literally buy everything you need.
I think this works because of a number of factors:
It is in a relatively affluent area with high walkability, cycle-ability, and some limited parking. As soon as you leave the road you are in residential areas. There is also a relatively high student population in the area.
The buildings are small and I assume rents are low (it's a long road with popular and less popular stretches) - easy for small new businesses to start.
It isn't in the city centre - it is truly a 'local' high street.
When I visit towns around the country (Stafford, where I grew up, is a great example), what I find are high streets and shopping areas that are cut off from residential properties, usually thanks to an inner ring road. They are located in the centre (unsurprisingly) of a town that has grown massively over the last 50+ years to the point where the high street is now many miles from where people live. It's literally easier to walk, cycle, or drive to the out of town retail parks than the high street. The high street shopping areas expanded during the 80s and 90s with huge floor spaces that an independent couldn't hope to fill.
To revive the high street, we need to literally flatten the town centres, keep the historic cores, and build medium-density residential. Make space for independents and support them.
But while that slowly doesn't happen, I'll still be visiting the cheesemonger on the Gloucester Road.
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@neil Years ago, people used to get their ordinary shopping in high streets. Then councils allowed companies to build massive out-of-town and edge-of-town-centre supermarkets with large car parks. That was the start of the decline, and has been gradually happening over the last 40 years. These places have also massively undercut the prices that the small shops that remain can afford to charge. High streets are now ghost places in many places. Of course, it happened in the US first...
@UkeleleEric @neil yeah. Out-of-town supermarkets (and Amazon) have made it so most people don't need to go into the high street. In turn, that's cut down on what you *can* get on the high street - no Currys, for example.
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@UkeleleEric @neil out of town supermarkets are stores of abused food. You can survive off it if you must, but it's not really living.
@mjr @UkeleleEric @neil Some people don't have a choice.
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> a high street as it was would be quite appealing
I'm far from sure!
It might provide a novelty, in a sort of "town from a postcard" kind of way, but more than that seems unlikely to me.
@neil If you turn the clock back further than the 1970s, most of the high streets had businesses that offered scheduled delivery. They worked more like Ocado, but there was no internet to set up the schedules and make selections. You're stuck with your local offerings, but that's also an advantage. We currently have all our eggs in too few baskets for our own long term good.
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The UK government is talking about "reviving high streets".
I don't go the town centre very often, as there is little that draws me to it. Coffee shops, charity shops, barbers shops. And, okay, a lovely indie board game shop, but I don't buy board games regularly.
My feeling is that a "high street", or "town centre", is an anachronism?
At least, I don't know what would have to change about our town centre, for me to want to go.
High streets revived and children given safe places to play
New initiative will support local areas to reimagine and revive their struggling high streets
GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
@neil if the government wants to revive high streets, it needs to reinstate the payments from central government to local, so that councils can keep business rates down, and provide amenities, and keep the place looking nice.
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The UK government is talking about "reviving high streets".
I don't go the town centre very often, as there is little that draws me to it. Coffee shops, charity shops, barbers shops. And, okay, a lovely indie board game shop, but I don't buy board games regularly.
My feeling is that a "high street", or "town centre", is an anachronism?
At least, I don't know what would have to change about our town centre, for me to want to go.
High streets revived and children given safe places to play
New initiative will support local areas to reimagine and revive their struggling high streets
GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
@neil
The details are (correctly, IMO) focused on making high streets more pleasant places with more public services. It's not a magic bullet, but it gives local business owners a fighting chance.I'm pleased to see the south east is largely taking a back seat (I live in the south east, with the exception of coastal towns we don't need the help).
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@revk Newbury is littered with coffee shops. One every 20m, perhaps! So no lack of paid social spaces.
Places where people can meet without having to pay would be nice.
We have a park, which is lovely in summer, and benches by the canal, and also quite a lot of green spaces outside the centre, so in summer, it is not too bad. In winter, options are meagre.
