Is the British high street dying?
Früher waren sie in Großbritannien das Herz jeder Stadt – jetzt sterben die geschäftigen Einkaufsstraßen einen langsamen Tod. Von STEPHEN ARMSTRONG
Whether it was Napoleon, Adam Smith or Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac who first said that “The British are a nation of shopkeepers,” the description remains a point of pride.
From the founding of the Selfridges department store in 1909, to leading the world in online commerce, the British have long been at the head of innovation in retail. Yet over the past 18 months, headline after headline has recorded the end of high-street shops, including Debenhams — a department store that began trading in 1778 and was serving customers as Napoleon’s Grande Armée marched across Europe.
Early this year, the chains Dorothy Perkins (1909), Wallis (1923), Burton (1903) and Debenhams were bought by online fashion site Boohoo, which purchased all four companies’ names but decided not to buy the 1,135 shops owned by the four chains. Around the same time, online fashion retailer Asos purchased the familiar UK fast fashion chains Topshop, Topman and Miss Selfridge, again deciding against the combined 120 shops operated by those firms. This means that almost 15 million square feet of space will be unused on British high streets, according to property adviser Altus Group.
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors says the UK saw 20,000 shops close in 2020 alone — including Carphone Warehouse, Oasis and Warehouse, Laura Ashley and Cath Kidston. Even survivors like Marks & Spencer, Boots, Whsmith and John Lewis announced that they were closing shops. The reason is obvious: Amazon’s UK sales rose by 51 per cent last year to £19.4 billion (€22.8 billion), as people staying at home during lockdown turned to online shopping.
The need for change
“The high street is not dead — but it needs radical surgery if it’s to have a meaningful future,” says retail analyst Richard Hyman. “This pandemic has condensed five years of developments into a single year. There was no online retailing 20 years ago. Today, 44 per cent of non-food shopping is online, but the amount of floor space in UK shops hasn’t really declined. We still haven’t seen the full extent of the shake-out yet.”
Government support for workers and companies through furlough schemes, tax holidays and financial support means “zombie shops” are protected from life-threatening economic pressure, Hyman explains. “A significant proportion of consumers have lost their jobs and they don’t know it,” he says. “Lots of companies have gone bust but they don’t know it. This will continue for the rest of this calendar year. I think that over the next few years, it’s going to be very, very painful — we will see the single biggest sector of the UK economy outside the public sector contract violently, shedding a lot of labour.”
The British Retail Consortium, which represents the UK’S big retailers, has for some time been lobbying the government to act. Property taxes in the UK — the taxes that bricks-andmortar shops pay but online retailers don’t — are high and business rates are rising. The consortium is pushing for lower property taxes, while some government ministers are considering an online sales tax — in effect, a tax on internet shopping. The government’s chief finance minister (chancellor of the exchequer), Rishi Sunak, is considering introducing such a tax on companies like Amazon in his autumn budget.
Paying for past mistakes
Bill Grimsey, former CEO of the Iceland supermarket chain and the Focus DIY chain, says this is a mistake. “My generation ruined every town centre by cloning them with shopping malls and identikit chain stores, then creating massive out-of-town shopping centres and no one rushed to save towns then,” he explains. “Taxes aren’t going to solve the problem — Woolworths used to be the UK’S biggest retailer and it closed in 2015. Change will happen. Amazon will go bust in the future. We have to make
high streets resilient to change and restore their heritage and unique history. These days, we look at what happened in the 1960s and think: Why did they build that crap? If we’re going to be looked back upon in 2100 as the people who really understood change, we have to think bigger and better.”
Grimsey’s career was in retail, but this is more than a business issue. Barbara Nettleton runs a community centre in Wigan, a former mining and mill town in the north-west of England. She’s based in an area called Scholes, which has long struggled with unemployment. Her centre, Sunshine House, has been on the edge of collapse since the post office closed a couple of years ago. “People used to travel to the precinct to cash their pension and benefit cheques, and then they’d shop there,” she explains. “Once the post office moved, they had to travel across town and all the shops closed.”
What was once a busy community shopping area became an empty, graffitied, concrete eyesore. It’s becoming a familiar image across the UK. Numbers from the retail research analysts Local
Data Company list York, Newcastle and Worcester as the worst-hit towns — but in regional terms, Greater London has seen the highest total number of closures, followed by the wealthy southeast of England.
A different high street for the future
Nettleton persuaded the council to let her community group take on three of the precinct’s shops. “We’ve got The Pantry selling unused food from the big supermarkets — membership costs £2 a year and you can get three loaves for three pence,” she explains. “Then there’s a second-hand clothes shop … where people going to interviews can borrow a suit or a dress. Finally, for mums, we sell prams and baby clothes laundered, pressed and sized. It’s all about dignity and pride.”
In north-east England, Neil Schneider, who was chief executive of the local council for 13 years, created a similar but much more ambitious policy. “When Woolworths collapsed, we knew large property-based retail was a failing business model,” he explains.
“Stockton in the 1960s had responded to local clamour for shopping malls, knocked down local shops and lost what made us unique. We had to rethink what our town centre was going to be.”
Schneider developed Stockton’s long history of performing arts, investing in restoring the local Georgian theatre and opening a comedy club and a local arts centre. He worked with charities to build a sustainable transport hub.
“We used to be a market town, so we encouraged market traders to open speciality markets — sci-fi, old records, books, anything that people liked browsing. We set up enterprise arcades — a business space for local people thinking of setting up in retail, where they could take a space for £30 per week with no commitment. Some failed, but we had a dozen local shops survive. We wanted the rebels, the quirky, the unusual ideas. We have asylum seekers and we welcomed their ideas for cafés and choirs.”
Schneider retired in 2019, but the council continues his work. All the council leisure centres — from sports to libraries to health centres — are now in and around the high street. They’ve just bought up the two 1960s shopping malls and plan to blow them up to create a riverside park. “We tried tracing the owners of large retail units, but they turned out to be shell companies in the Cayman Islands,” he says, adding: “We’re better off if land is owned and used by the community.”
In the Midlands, Danny Flynn, who runs the YMCA in Stoke-on-trent, is excited by these ideas. Stoke, he explains, has always had very few customers coming into the city from the outside. He thinks the future of the high street will involve creative workshops, communal eating spaces in the old meat market, street clowns and theatre.
“It’s asset-based community development,” he explains. “Modernism was a topdown single idea. Postmodernism destroyed all that and forgot spirituality along the way, so everything is tribalism. People look back too much. It wasn’t better then, but the myth develops. The collective has been destroyed by deindustrialization. We need to rebuild collegial relationships and bring community back so it can start demanding more. Where has that always happened? In the market square. That’s where we start building a new world — we build it from the high street out.”