1 The High Street: A perfect storm

A much overused phrase, but “perfect storm” pretty much sums up the traumas the High Street is going through right now. As we all know, the last few years and months have seen some famous names disappear, from Woolworths and MFI in the depths of the recession, to Focus DIY, Habitat and Oddbins this year, with the likes of Thorntons and Carpetright going through some tough times too. On a longer perspective the CoOp was once the nation’s Number 1 grocer. In the 1930s it was feared by everyone; but it long since failed to modernise and it probably deserved to lose its pre-eminence to Sainsburys and then Tescos.
Some of these casualties, then, were just retail businesses that were out of step with their times or left behind by new technology (e.g. downloads rather than CDs and DVDs from HMV); others purely victims of the slump in the housing market (less demand for new white goods, household and carpets) and some were just mismanaged.
But all have been hit by three secular unpleasant trends. Paramount is the squeeze on household spending – taxes, public spending cuts, a rising tide of redundancies in the public sector, inflation and minimal pay raises have robbed us of our purchasing power. We have been running down our savings and borrowing to make up for it, but that is hardly sustainable (as we have already learnt to our cost).
Second there is the trend to online shopping for everything from groceries to songs. Clothing and furniture seem less vulnerable to this, but the impact is widespread; 10 per cent of all retail sales are now via a computer screen.
Lastly, the move to out of town shopping centres has hit the purely “high Street” neighbourhood activities of all retailers, even though they benefit from shoppers turning up to these vast, rather characterless malls. And it’s a perfect storm because these factors tend to feed on each other; high streets that lose familiar names, even temporarily, end up looking like a smile with broken teeth, and when a certain number of shops end boarded up the area becomes depressing, loses critical mass and deters even more shoppers.
The decline of the pub hasn’t helped (and here the Treasury has a lot to answer for the way it taxes booze) and the closure of so many bank branches has also been a loss: and there just aren’t enough charity shops and bookies shops to fill all the empty spaces. As for coffee shops and sarnie outlets, well even Subway and Starbucks have limits to growth.
The good news, such as it is, is that the Office for National Statistics has noted that the only real growth area in conventional retail is in small specialist stores and farmers markets – delis, good quality “boutique” butchers and bakers – who have to be good to have survived the predations of the big stores. To some extent this yearning for tasty proper food – Slow Food if you will – may have also helped the likes of Waitrose it may just be that we are tiring of the dominance of the superstore and some, at least those who can afford £2.50 for a loaf – are (re)discovering the joys of buying different things from different specialists who know their sirloin from their rump.
To my mind the unspoken responsibility for much of the decline in city centres lies firmly with the crazed Stalinist pedestrianisation that has gradually taken cars and bustle and life out of high streets for the past 40 years. If you can’t find where to park without some monster of a traffic warden waiting to fine you £55 for the privilege, then you really will go elsewhere to buy your new sofa. As an experiment I would welcome some brave council just scrapping all those pedestrian-only streets and allowing people to park for free where they wanted. Too much to ask I imagine, but surely worth a go.