Build Back Better? High Streets and Low Streets…
By Prof Richard Kerley
‘Build back better ‘is a phrase we will all have become familiar with over the past year or so. We’ve heard it from politicians and government ministers, and I have seen it chalked on paths whilst out walking in South Edinburgh. Given the different authors of that phrase I think we can assume they all (probably) mean different things with potentially different outcomes.
That’s hardly surprising really; people who chalk on pavements probably have different views of what is desirable (and what is achievable) than do government ministers. There are, though, some genuinely hard to resolve contradictions in what we as a society might wish to see emerge later in 2021 or as we move forward into 2022 and beyond.
Here are some thoughts about some of those possibilities and their contradictions, how they come about and how we might find ways to build on developments that have been quietly growing over recent years.
For a start, the majority of us think that we need to do something about the environmental crisis; I do suspect, however, that we are either unsure about the way that might impact on us, or are hesitant about what we are willing to do about it, as one major study of British Social Attitudes showed.
There are many ways we might address both the environmental challenge and, at the same time, improve the environment in which we live, study and work. Part of the solution has to be reducing unnecessary travel and particularly car travel in our towns and cities, and to move to more active modes of travel supported by good public transport.
One growing policy ambition, initially developed in places like Melbourne and Paris, is the idea of a more localised sustainable communities; here in Scotland we have labelled that the ’20 minute neighbourhood’. This takes account of the fact that research in many urban societies suggests that purposefully walking 10 minutes to somewhere such as a school or shop (and then the 10 minutes back home) is the typically acceptable distance that most of us will walk – in reasonable weather.
That idea is attractive and appealing for some, and easily doable for most. For a good while I used to introduce myself at conferences as living in an area close to the city centre because: ‘I want a good espresso within 10 minutes’ walk of the house.’ I also observed that that was one of the reasons I don’t chose to live in Glen Finnan, delightful as that part of the country is.
We can create and encourage more localised neighbourhoods than we now have but that will obviously be far easier to achieve in, and near, urban settings – Edinburgh, Hamilton or Inverness – than it will in rural and very remote areas. It will also become more problematic if our approach to housing provision is to continue the development of the ‘Edge Cities’ that we increasingly see around and adjacent to all our major cities and many of our towns. Such ex-urban developments are almost designed to require car ownership – probably increasingly in two car households – and are often located close to motorways that take people to work and allow them to buy their household needs from the supermarket close to the motorway junction on the way home. Such developments rarely support any developed form of local shopping or add much in robust liveliness to local urban centres.
There are options that would enable us to counter the increasing fragmentation of our settlements and bring life back to both neighbourhoods and to urban centres (whether large or small). We also have to think of those urban cores rapidly changing as retail is ravaged by changing patterns of supply and provision. It’s very telling, for example, that the recent collapses of shops like Debenhams and the Arcadia Group have seen acquisition out of liquidation of the brands, not the staff, by firms that have grown wildly in the past decade, with growth based almost entirely through on-line sales and don’t want to move into the physical high street shops.
Actions that might be taken to reinvigorate our town centres are discussed and recommended to the Scottish Government in a recently commissioned report – ‘ A New Future for Scotland’s Town Centres’. This report sets out a range of practical recommendations including changes to taxation both for building based businesses and on-line retailers, tilting the balance back to the high street by, for example, levying charges on out-of-town shopping car parking and other measures to encourage town centre activity.
What is not mentioned is a very bold move that the Scottish Government could take if they wanted to test out a more interventionist approach to both rescuing some parts of our towns and also contributing to the provision of homes. We have experience – and generally not very good experience – of re-purposing some premises from offices/shops to housing. In Harlow, Essex, a shoddy private conversion of offices to flats has been described as ‘..like an open prison’. There can potentially be a positive impact from such conversions if they are done in a better way, to better standards, by councils, Housing Associations or other community organisations. Better quality housing can be combined with appropriate units for essential shops, cafes (not bars) or ‘public facing ‘ activities that are compatible with housing.
Previously, when the Scottish Government has committed money to ‘town centres‘ it has often been dispersed in ways that spread (and minimised) impact. We have seen numerous landscaping and street scape improvements that marginally improved the appearance of a street – albeit one that may well still have empty, slow to let shops with shabby frontage and inaccessible upper floors. The wide dispersal of this money reached its apex in 2019 when every council received a pot of money that ranged from £200k in Orkney to over £4M in Fife. This is almost by definition an ‘all shall be winners‘ model of decision making, never very effective at anything other than avoiding a fuss; maybe we need a fuss. There have however been some instances of imaginative interventions, such as in Dumfries. Here in a classic setting of a previously – and some while ago – thriving town centre on the High Street, at Midsteeple, a community based organisation has been supported to buy and re-purpose existing neglected properties .
A far bolder move would be to take advantage of collapsed and distressed property prices, suffered by collapsing and distressed property companies. With the options of council borrowing using ‘prudential ‘powers at very low interest rates, they might acquire and consolidate property ownerships on some of our town/city centre shopping streets. We should deliberately start this with a far smaller group of councils than are usually included in such town centre regeneration schemes. Conversion of long neglected shops and other premises to mixed use by these pilot councils, collaborating with RSLs could provide a model to test out whether we can re-enliven such streets, by concentration and conversion. I believe we need to accept that the ‘high street’, and the adjacent surrounding streets of the 1950s and before are never going to return. We can either live with a long slow decline or (in some towns) a decline that may accelerate very quickly indeed, or we can take positive action to re-shape our city and town centres. In effect, we can take the process of acquisition and ownership consolidation that gave us the indoor, covered ‘shopping centres’ of the 1970s and re-create smaller and more concentrated shopping streets that we can walk to and walk in.
If we are to ‘build back better’ we need to be bold about the ways in which we put that building into effect. What the Scottish Government could, and should, do is, through consultation and agreement, focus on four or five towns where the need for action is most apparent and invest serious amounts of investment money in each of those pilot towns, not spread it thinly and proportionately across all councils.
Which towns might that be? Well, where would you suggest?
