My ideal home? An old shop

A couple more shops closed on our local high street last month.

Even charity shops are closing. Mothercare, Debenhams and Cath Kidston have gone across the country. Coronavirus has made the retail collapse much worse.

It isn’t just the virus’s fault. Clicking a mouse at a screen in the warmth of our homes is so much more convenient than traipsing up and down rainy pavements.

But what next? We know what happens when a part of a town is abandoned: the American rustbelt has shown us. It starts with empty shops, which become boarded-up buildings, followed by vandalism and urban decay.

Chocolate-box towns, loved by tourists, won’t suffer this neglect. But our less glamorous local high streets could well be abandoned. Many high streets will become strips of betting shops, late-night bars and cheap burger joints.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Our new way of shopping could be a terrific opportunity to rethink our town centres. Remember what many high-street buildings were for in the first place. Outside the city centres, almost every high street in Britain is lined with stout, splendid, Georgian and Victorian buildings, built originally as family homes.

The retail revolution of the past century and a half, when so many have been converted into shops, may have changed their original purpose. But look above the shopfronts – many of the splendid old homes are still there. Some are flats, but many are just storage space – doomed to become increasingly empty.

Every day, we read about the shortage of homes and, on the other hand, threats to the Green Belt from new developments. At the same time, many once attractive high-street houses stand semi-neglected.

Will urban planners be brave enough to restore and convert shops as fit-for-purpose, modern homes?

The process is already happening around London’s Oxford Street, where residential developments mean the area is reverting to its origins in 1729, when it was a smart place to live.

Not everyone wants to live in the suburbs. Not everyone drives. Flats in town centres, within walking distance of hospitals, doctors, libraries, newsagents, transport, theatres and town halls suit the elderly, students, nurses, teachers and families of various incomes – who benefit from living close to their work and schools.

The easy – and probably cheaper – answer is to bulldoze the old and build new. But taking a wrecking ball to history leads only to cultural rubble – areas of towns razed of their character. Bustling town centres can and should be the magnetic local meeting points they always were.

So, let’s take those plate-glass windows out of empty premises and reshape those vacant shops into the homes they used to be.

It will take foresight from central government, local authorities and developers, as well as courage and money – lots of money. But what choice do we have if the alternative is to see our high streets increasingly abandoned?

If we are to preserve our town centres, we have to recreate our past before the buddleia gets hold of it.