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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Sales tacks. What to do with the high street holes caused by shop closures
Debenhams, House of Fraser, Homebase and more – this is the grim story of the UK high street so far this yearhttps://t.co/UhZU4a9v0E
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I will say a lot of those places with closures are what I’d call shitholes.
Coincidence? I think not.
Didn’t even consider places like Barnsley would be in the top 100.
Not big enough to have full scale shopping centres themselves, but still plenty of people live there.
These places aren't going to get people going there unless they are local themselves, but a lot of local people will go to the bigger places for shopping.
I suspect the future of the high street (if there is one) is with goods and services that can't easily be bought on-line - nailbars, hairdressers, chiropodists, dentists, doctors, restaurants, coffee shops, childcare, social care. These are all fairly labour intensive so they provide employment as well as services.
The continuing freeze in fuel duty is consequently politically significant in this context.
To be fair, not all High Streets are the same. East Ham High Street remains a dynamic place with businesses opening all the time. I've no doubt the Poundworld Plus site (which was formerly Peacocks) will be converted into something else in time.
We have a lot of bookmakers (the change in FOBT rules next year might impact) and a growing number of eateries - mainly coffee shops - and a number of shops tailored to specific national groups (we have Romanian shops and a café due to open for Africans from the former Portuguese colonies).
Part of the problem may be the rents landlords are charging and the constant upward revisions. Organisations using retail as Investment Properties are obviously wanting a high rental yield but the fact is retail space is prohibitively expensive in many areas. As for conversion to residential, there are plenty of flats above shops and most plans I see for town centre regenerations (and especially a lot of projects at railway stations) involve a mix of commercial, retail and residential as the long segregation of activities ends and a more diffuse use of space emerges.
One theory I've seen is the notion of "Place" where working, living, relaxing and socialising all happen in the same place or same vicinity so communal areas linked to small-scale office spaces linked to recreational areas linked to residential areas all tied together with strong super-fast WiFi.
The next revolution could well be in how we live, work, relax, play and interact whereby there is less travel and more happens in the same area - that could be the future of urban centres.
Not really, as has been pointed out the T34 & variants was the tank design triumph of WWII (the Panther was Germany's thoroughbred response), not to mention later heavy tank designs. German armour was over engineered, but they were pretty good at utilising obsolete & even captured chassis in the tank destroyer & sp gun roles which was vital for the defensive retreats that they perforce had to fight. The Pzkpfw IV, the backbone of the Panzerarmees right till the end, was kept more-or-less competitive by engineering innovation.
But yes, in the end it was a numbers game East and West.
If Labour are campaigning in these places, what are their proposed remedies. Genuinely curious.
My local town in Cumbria is probably an example of what you are writing about. It does not have a buzzy high street but it does have a fair selection of shops: Tesco, Boots, newsagent, local store selling everything from school uniforms to pillow cases etc, diy stores, post office, cafe, pubs, restaurant, butcher, baker etc and one very good independent clothes shop, a bit of a destination place for those who know about it. That last one works because the owners have chosen very wisely in what they sell - top class stylish clothes not easy to get elsewhere, at a good price and, crucially, the experience is pleasant : a proper chat, a coffee, somewhere to sit down, proper old-fashioned service.
This compares very favourably with shops in London where often there is little attempt made to make the experience enjoyable. I do think that, whatever sort of shop you are, but especially for discretionary spending, the experience needs to be a big part of it not just simply the purchase. And some shops will be only for experiences eg beauty shops, hairdressers etc.
The Houses of Fraser, Debenhams etc seem to me to fall between two stools: not particularly special and not much better than a covered market. Shopping there is depressing and soul destroying.
But there are empty shops too and they stay empty for a long time. This puzzles me. Why? Surely it would be better for the landlord to have some rent rather than none at all.
One final point: there was a thriving local network centre with wi-fi, pop up office, Greek cafe, exercise classes etc attached to the local school. For reasons of local politics too boring to go into here, it has closed though the locals are trying to get it reinstated. It is the council which is proving difficult and unhelpful. The difference between a town finding worthwhile alternatives to the traditional high street and dying may well be the quality and oomph of local politicians.
Low 60s, only missed Belfast on the first line as I over-thought it. Most were 'oh, there, yeah, should have worked along the train line better' (which is roughly how I approached it - picked trainlines and mentally worked along the tracks).
The only one I'd genuinely never head of was Rayleigh.
Retail and hospitality are often seen as low skilled jobs. But, actually, being able to read people, to treat them well, to provide a good experience, to make them feel better for having visited you, to make them want to come again is harder than it looks. A lot of retailers have forgotten this and this may be one reason why they do not do well.
Yesterday, for instance, I was in a cafe I’ve never been in before havig some time to kill. At lunchtime ( though the place was not busy), the supervisor decided to train one of the staff. Mistake no. 1. This should have been done before it opened not at what was likely to be a busier time. I asked for a coffee. Three times. The second time of asking should have alerted the supervisor that, maybe, just maybe, she should have stopped showing the junior how to write down a typical order and instead told her to write down this order. And fulfill it too.
The cost was silly. The experience woeful. I won’t be going there again. It was a cafe. Producing a bloody cup of coffee should not have sent it into a tailspin. A lot of businesses neglect the absolute basics.
My own town centre has been substantially hollowed out over the last two to three years, and is now dominated by coffee shops, tattoo parlours, barber shops, betting shops and charity shops (which, remarkably, seem to be what people want).
No evidence, just gut feel.
People opposed to the current president vote in mid terms.
High turnout means either lots more of people opposed to the president are voting or that people who support the president are voting.
Mixing offices in particular with shops provides a good source of shoppers for the shops.
The planning and infrastructure provision needs to adapt to the demographic of the area. I do agree simply taking out more Green Belt land and building more Estates of three and four bedroom houses is good news only for the property developers and house builders. We need to think differently about how people can live, work, relax and interact in ways that are sustainable (and not just in the "green" sense of that word).
Every time I see the housing estates of the 1930s and later I'm reminded of the lines from Eleanor Rigby - "All the lonely people, where do they all come from? All the lonely people, where do they all belong?" I think pre and post-war housing has generated a culture of loneliness (not helped by modern technology).
https://twitter.com/ProfChalmers/status/1057590548029149184
It goes to show that it's very much a local thing. Maybe we are just lucky.
[This ad was sponsored by Barnesian]
EDIT: Question - why? Answer - wealthy well-educated people who cooperate to make it work.
Impressive - I did half as well - couldn't get number 6 - Sheffield, allegedly.
I recently saw an example of 'the dying High Street' in Gateshead - the High Street is a boarded up dilapidated dump - and right next to it, a popular brand new shopping centre.
Taking the longer perspective - is any of this really new? Where I used to live in Newcastle on the quayside was the centre of commercial and retail life until Stephenson's High Level Bridge bypassed it in 1850 and the centre of commerce moved up the hill - the area fell to dereliction and was razed by a great fire later that decade, The Victorians built handsome office buildings to support the trade down the Tyne and the area flourished and prospered for nigh on a century. When the trade went, so did the offices and again the area fell to disuse and disrepair. Then the "gentrification" of the 1980s and 1990s saw the offices converted to retail (ground) and residential (upper floors) use and once more the quayside prospers.
I know in the long term we're all dead - and seeing your once flourishing High Street a down at heels dump is no doubt dispiriting - but I'm not sure there's much the government - or anyone - can do about it.
Anyway, I've calculated I just need 12 return journeys to capture - on film! - the main national rail network routes I need.
Glasgow to Oban/Mallaig/Alloa/Stranraer
Leuchars to Dundee
Cardenden loop
Edinburgh to Perth to Dundee
Ladybank to Perth
Perth/Dundee to Inverness
Inverness to Kyle/Wick
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/hot-air-over-an-office-block-1074385.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_Point
It's not universally true of course and someone will find an exception. As you say, pro-Government or pro-President supporters may be as motivated to vote as those in opposition.
Have a look at the Brighouse & Spenborough by-elections of both 1950 and 1960 to see what turnout can be like and what it can mean.
People will probably never sell, unless.... they have to - but if you've got £20 million to spend on a flat you probably will never need to. It creates a very odd market indeed.
https://twitter.com/ProfChalmers/status/1057590548029149184
Veering off-topic but the "amp." in the URL is another step in Google's dominance of the web.
From Digital Trends
"You’ll soon be able to get Google AMP quality without that pesky AMP URL
Google amp removing url
Every good thing seems to come with a price, and when it came to Google’s fast-loading webpages, that price was seeing an Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)-specific URL instead of a normal web address. But luckily, it looks like Google’s no longer charging us with those URLs.
This week, Malte Ubl, the tech lead for the AMP Project, announced that a new version of the AMP Cache would make its debut. In short, the team is changing how AMP works in Google Search and other platforms, and will thereby allow linked pages to “appear under publishers’ URLs instead of the google.com/amp URL space.” Best of all, this change won’t have any effect on the speed or privacy that comes along with AMP Cache serving.
“When we first launched AMP in Google Search we made a big trade-off: To achieve the user experience that users were telling us that they wanted, instant loading, we needed to start loading the page before the user clicked.” Malte explained in a blog post. He continued, however, “Privacy reasons make it basically impossible to load the page from the publisher’s server … Instead, AMP pages are loaded from the Google AMP Cache but with that behavior the URLs changed to include the google.com/amp/ URL prefix.”
But now, Google is looking into a new version of the AMP Cache that is predicated upon the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Packing standard, which should make the AMP addresses look like, well … any other web address. Thus far, Google’s tests have proven satisfactory, and Malte wrote, “The next steps are moving towards fully implementing the new web standard in web browsers and in the Google AMP Cache.” The goal is for Web Packaging to become “available in as many browsers as possible,” he noted. “In particular, we intend to extend existing work on WebKit to include the implementation of Web Packaging and the Google Chrome team’s implementation is getting started.”
I hope that's clear now.
I noted in my recent trip to Normandy there were far more small shops of the sort you describe above, the house prices there wouldn't be so far from the French average.
I'm not sure what my point is, just its a little sad that what should be a pleasent level of pleasent commercial nearby stock shouldn't just be near the top of the UK market.
It doesn't appear to be abroad.
If you consider parliamentary constituencies, the towns and cities listed are one or more constituencies worth.
Where a constituency containes a town plus its hinterland, then the town is likely to be too small for the list.
A recent analysis in Dundee showed that coffee shops were up 33% over the last year. This seems to be increasingly the default for empty units although I personally struggle to see how these will all survive. Again the likes of Starbucks, Costa and Cafe Nero won't benefit but many of the independents will.
I have far too much liking for coffee and cake for my own good but for most town centres need to find a reason for people to come into town in the first place. Without the department stores that is more of a challenge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
What is the town doing? Building a new shopping centre!!! At the same time as what's left of town centre housing (the "Seven Sisters" tower blocks) are coming back down forcing people to chose to drive into a town centre where neighbouring Bury or Oldham - or Manchester - are better.
What's the solution? Surely needs to be residential. Rochdale borough has amazing Pennine scenery, a great industrial heritage and good transport links. Making it THE place to live surely is better than trying to compete with the Trafford Centre.
Some places have it naturally: I recently walked through Bourton-in-the-Water, which will always be able to attract tourists. But most places can probably find something to attract tourists, people and jobs in.
One other thing I'd note: it depends on the people living in an area as well. If locals treat an area poorly, it's hard to get others to treat it well.
Halcyon days.
Cooperation is key.
I think a lot of damage has been done by the encouragement of personal competition and individualism at the expense of cooperation over the last forty years. It's different in Eastern cultures. That's why they're the future. We are the Neanderthals. Corbyn and McDonnell are our only hope. They see the value of cooperation over competition. [ducks]
What we need are two or three small units - say 1,000 square or smaller - that could be rented for short periods by people 'trying out' a business. There's certainly lots of entrepreneurial spirit in the town, but they're having to open shops elsewhere.
I told you all to back Hammond as next PM, history is on his side.
http://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2018/08/05/history-suggests-one-of-philip-hammond-jeremy-hunt-and-sajid-javid-will-be-theresa-mays-successor-if-she-goes-before-the-next-election/
(sobs softly).
I miss Castleton.
If gaps do emerge still then converting former retail premises to offices or affordable accommodation seems srnsible
The wife and me went to Bridport last weekend. It has a thriving high street and there was a great street market on the Saturday. The weather was beautiful (which always helps) but I was taken aback at the thousands of people out. It was hard to move on the pavements. It felt a bit middle-class there (lots of older gentlemen in tweeds, shirt and tie) and a bit of what old-fashioned, well-heeled polite England should be like. Impressive, and not a boarded up shop for miles.
I've been looking at the Sporting Index spread markets on turnout in the US mid-terms. I think there could be some value in certain states, but I'm unclear on the definitions of turnout. SPIN say:
A prediction of the State voter turnout in the US Senate Mid-Term Elections. Settlement will be rounded to one-tenth of a percentage point and adjudicated by www.nytimes.com
However, turnout in US elections sometimes seems to be expressed as a proportion of registered voters, and sometimes as a proportion of adults of voting age. Does anyone know exactly what definition the NY Times uses?
It is that he and his fellow idiots are close to being if not are already in a position of influence.
Overnight it emerged David Cameron regards Michael Gove as a lunatic and that might hinder Gove’s chances.
Although it does beg the question of why he left him at Education for so many years...
He was responding to an email pitch from freelance journalist Selene Nelson who had suggested features on plant-based recipes.
Sitwell, also a critic on Masterchef, apologised for any offence caused.
Waitrose said: "William's email absolutely doesn't represent our views about vegans and vegan food."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46042314
Great place to base a walk from though.
Which cities does this not affect? Well, the ones nobody with any sense would drive in anyway. Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham spring to mind, but most of all London.
For the rest, I would have said the fastest way to start a revival would be to offer 3 hours free parking.