We’re ALL to blame for deserted town centres that are straight out of a ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
After a bleak video of once-prosperous Waterlooville went viral, ROBERT HARDMAN paid a visit. His provocative conclusion?
THE Covid- era ‘ Keep Your Distance’ stickers are still glued to the walkway but that is the only reminder of what once stood beyond these brick walls and sealed-up doorways: the holy grail of retail gentrification — a big fat Waitrose.
However, in 2020, post-lockdown, the doors closed, the hoardings went up and the building has stood empty ever since.
Waitrose owns the lease until 2026. It’s just cheaper to keep it closed than run it at a loss.
At the other end of the mall — and of the retail spectrum — there also used to be a Wilko. Except that shut last year. It has, at least, been taken over by a One Beyond discount store.
In the colonnade which runs between these two big retail units, half a dozen smaller shops are clinging on, helped in no small part by the county council’s decision to offer free spots in the adjacent car park.
This is the scene on one side of the high street of the once-bustling Hampshire town of Waterlooville. It takes its name from the ‘Heroes of Waterloo’ pub, built in the 19th century at the crossroads of the London-Portsmouth road and east-west traffic along the South Coast. A ring road and the A3 have long since bypassed the town centre which is now a pedestrian precinct.
The picture is even more bleak on the other side of the high street. There I find something called Wellington Way. It’s not so much a shopping mall as a film set waiting for a dystopian zombie drama, or a demolition ball. Almost everything is stripped out or boarded up.
Aside from one charity shop, it has nothing to lure people down its two unprepossessing walkways so, unsurprisingly, they do not bother. There is an Iceland at the far end with its own car park beyond. Most customers come in from there.
The mall is decorated with faded murals of early 19th-century soldiers overlooking a George III-era cannon with a plate saying it is ‘ on loan from the Royal Armouries’. Concrete cannon balls shaped as seats are occupied by no one. Yet all this was built in 1966, its empty two-storey buildings a perfect homage to the banality and ugliness of Sixties municipal vernacular design.
ASHORT video of this joyless dump appeared on social media in January, courtesy of a woman who grew up in the town and had returned to visit her parents. ‘Look at it!’ she exclaims, scanning the camera around the shopping haunts of her youth. ‘There’s just bloody nothing here!’
The clip has ‘gone viral’, as they say, and been viewed nearly three million times, prompting yet another debate about the future of our town centres. The site, we are told, has recently been acquired by an owner who is promising new shops with flats above.
No one is holding their breath.
Many commentators wag the finger of blame at the Tories or the council (or both, since it is a Tory council). With Britain officially in (a technical) recession, and the Budget and both local and general elections in prospect, what better time to look again at that seemingly incurable patient — the British High Street?
What makes Waterlooville both interesting yet unexceptional is that this is not a ‘forgotten’ area of chronic deprivation, crying out for state intervention. I expect most of us will know somewhere similar.
We cannot pin this dismal scene on the closure of steelworks or the mines or that old Leftie catch-all — ‘Thatcher’. This sits alongside some of the most prosperous real estate in the country, not least Hampshire’s Meon Valley and the South Downs around Petersfield.
When the closure of Waitrose was announced, one anguished shopper wailed to the Portsmouth News that there was nowhere else in the area to buy ‘pickled lemons and different types of corn-fed chicken’. No violins played.
There is an Asda on the outskirts and it is only a ten-minute walk from the high street to a retail park down the hill below the town where a Sainsbury’s megastore and an M& S are humming. Indeed, the popularity of this retail park is such that locals complain it can take an hour just to get out of the place at peak times due to a wonky traffic layout.
Everyone has their own proposal for rejuvenating the town centre — be it a wall-climbing centre or a family butcher. But they also acknowledge, albeit grudgingly, that the main responsibility for the decline of the centre of Waterlooville — and everywhere else like it — rests with us all.
If we increasingly want to shop online, and we do, then we are going to have to accept that we must remodel our town centres, or else see them shrivel.
‘Those people who mourned the loss of high street names like Woolworths were usually the same ones who nailed the lid on the coffin,’ says the veteran retail analyst, Richard Hyman. ‘Over the last 20 years, we have seen the way in which 40 per cent of non-food retail has moved to the internet. Yet we have seen nothing like a corresponding 40 per cent reduction in the number of high street shops.
‘That means that while some are learning to run much faster, others are going to go and there are more closures still to come.’
And they can’t all be turned into nail bars, fast-food joints or those curiously empty barber shops.
Walking around Waterlooville, it is clear all is not lost. The mandatory Wetherspoons is ticking along and there are plenty of premises which are anything but zombielike, usually thanks to the efforts of their enterprising occupants.
Take the Little Bay Eatery on the high street. It opened a year ago after Melanie Humphreys and her co- owner, Peter Exton, decided that there was still demand for a good high street meeting point with good food.
‘I must admit that I was scared at the time but I knew people like to go out for a coffee and meet up,’ she says. ‘And we now have a very strong regular crowd. Some lunchtimes, we’re having to turn people away.’
The three hours of free parking behind the old Waitrose is crucial, she says. That way, for example, the weekly knitting club, which
meets in the library, will adjourn for a coffee here.
Next door, Waterlooville Fruit & Veg has a riot of colour on its shelves plus plenty of local sauces and chutney from places such as the Isle of Wight. Andrew Price, 52, has been a greengrocer here for more than twenty years and says that there are still just enough people who want fresh produce which lasts longer than the shrinkwrapped supermarket stuff.
‘But unless there are some significant incentives to encourage business back into the high street, it’s going to be difficult,’ he says.
‘It’s not just internet shopping. Covid has got everyone more online now. Internet banking means people don’t come into the bank any more.’ The town has seen something of a banking exodus lately, while Lloyds, HSBC and Halifax are hanging on.
‘We’d love to see another big name on this site,’ says Chris Jenkins, owner of Celebration, an independent card and gift shop alongside the shell of the old Waitrose. He says that this part of town was thriving until the 2020 lockdown, after which Waitrose pulled out.
Raised in a family newsagents’ shop, he has been a Hampshire retailer for 42 years. With more variety than the big card chains, he has a good range of stock, a loyal following and business is brisk while we talk, again buoyed by the free parking outside. Several shoppers tell me that, without that, they wouldn’t bother.
But Mr Jenkins says the current situation — with rent of £1,000 a week and a £1,300 quarterly service charge on top of £400-a-week business rates — is not sustainable.
High street florist Martin Lawley has no quarrel with the internet since most of his business comes that way. He tells me that what the area needs is more independent retailers like him. ‘Let’s see a shoe shop or a sports shop. Right now it feels neglected and that leads to a negative attitude.’
No one is expecting handouts or a magic wand, be it from the council or Whitehall. Nor does anyone blame the likes of Waitrose for pulling out if they can’t make a profit. There is simply an increasingly pressing desire for some sort of reboot.
The local council is well aware of the strength of feeling. In January, it opened up a disused shop for a ‘festival of ideas’ where everyone could drop in to offer them. A team of urban planners has gone away to distil them. ‘There are new government schemes we will apply to but you can’t go to government without a plan,’ says councillor Gwen Robinson, deputy leader and the cabinet lead on housing and communities.
‘I don’t believe the high street is dead but it needs community spaces. There is only so much a council can do when you have absentee landlords like pension funds who have no affiliation with the area.’
Does she see a future for the town centre without a Waitrosestyle core tenant?
‘Yes I do. You can’t just throw in the towel,’ she insists, adding that she is particularly interested in the idea of an indoor market.
That is certainly popular among those I meet in the street. There is also a keen appetite to see more housing in the town, rather than see yet another chunk of neighbouring farmland turned over to new housing, like the vast new development of 5,000 homes which has just opened down the road at Berewood.
That may mean another 20,000 residents but they’re not in walking distance of the town, so they’ll be straight in their cars and off to the retail park.
Some might never set foot in the town centre from one month to the next. ‘Of course we need a radical rethink and that should include converting a lot of these shops into flats,’ says retired lecturer Carol Legg, among the trickle of shoppers on the high street.
SHE points across to what used to be a large cinema and function hall called the Curzon Rooms. It’s now been bulldozed to make way for a car park. This boasts plenty of empty spaces since it does not offer free parking (like the one round the corner) and has a beady- eyed warden waiting to pounce with a ticket. How on earth was this allowed to happen?
You could hardly devise a better way of deterring town centre footfall than by bulldozing a leisure amenity in order to create a car park for people who thus have one less reason for coming in the first place.
I talk to several veterans of the local business scene.
The biggest local employer used to be the Wadham Stringer car dealership, until it was taken over in the early 1980s. Retired ex-boss Michael Stringer, who lives a couple of miles down the road, fondly recalls the days when the town was a hive of activity. He admits he seldom ventures there today but reflects that ‘ change is always a challenge’.
Local electrician Michael Jackson and his wife Janet, a nurse for 40 years, have spent their lives here. The family’s brightly painted shop was always the go-to place for electrical supplies until the internet made that unviable. Yet the contracting side of the business continues under son Peter.
‘We still work out of the same premises because we want to keep a presence in the town. But we’d like to build a flat there, too,’ says Michael. The planning process, he says, does not make it easy.
So what to do? One overarching message for both local and national government is that it has to be easier to convert retail to residential, if you want humans instead of zombies in your town centres.
And for the rest of us? Use it or lose it.