Three steps to High Street heaven?

Making places

Worth saving

The High Street context¹

A strong high street full of great shops is a vital component of a town.

That’s true at an economy-wide level. Nearly 3m people work in retailing in the UK and it is a major contributor to GDP.

But it is also evident at a more personal level in the way we all talk about the towns and cities we live in. Facebook groups about the history of your town will often include reminiscences about that sweet shop or greengrocer from days gone by. Good shops matter.

But if we all hold shops in such high regard, why do they keep disappearing? According to the Centre for Retail Research, some 15,000 shops will close this year. Just in the last few months in the town I live in we’ve seen vacancies pop up as both national chains and independent businesses alike have closed. That’s bad news not only for the people who worked in those businesses but also for the community at large – vacant shops don’t look good, reduce footfall for the remaining businesses and can have an unnerving tendency to spread like an infection.

The key to building a vibrant high street is understanding why these businesses are closing. There are some obvious short-term reasons, of course: rising costs, shortages of staff and the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on customers are all factors that make it hard to run a retail business right now.

But beyond the immediate pressures there are some underlying challenges that businesses today also need to respond to. The fact is that the world has changed in the last 20 years.

The new retail paradigm

The clearest illustration of that change is that you have every price, on every product from every brand in the world available to you all the time through the internet. That entirely changes what it means to be a retailer.

The role of retail used to be about distribution - about being there and having the products you needed. Except in very unusual circumstances, that is no longer enough. A retailer needs to offer you new and better reasons to buy from them because you simply have more choices now.

The good news is that even in this information saturated world there are plenty of ways a retailer can still persuade you to part with your money. They might be good at picking out a range of products that work well together and save you a lot of frustrating searches online. That’s what terrific clothing boutiques do for example. Alternatively, a retailer might be selling a product which is complex and where their expertise and advice is valuable to customers – think of the cycling and sports shops, for instance.

The trick for any retailer, therefore, is to be clear about the value that they are adding over and above just being there. They must have a great answer to the question “why should I buy this from you?”. There is a whole series on possible answers to that challenge coming to Moving Tribes soon (and if you haven’t subscribed already, it is worth doing so just for that).

It isn’t easy, but there are great retailers (both chains and independents) rising to that challenge all around the country today. That’s why I’m optimistic about the future of the retail sector. Although some have fallen by the wayside, there are always new businesses popping up with an idea and the passion to bring it to life.

The placemaking challenge

Towns and city centres do need, however, to work hard to make themselves as attractive as possible for new retail businesses and to make sure that their existing retailers thrive. We can’t take our High Streets for granted; they need all of our support. That’s the business of ‘placemaking’ – the evolving and critical cross-disciplinary activity of trying to make our towns the very best they can be.

I’m no placemaking expert, but I’ve listened carefully to lots of people who are. If I was to summarise what I’ve learned, I think of the actions we can take as communities in three ‘layers’.

The first layer is making sure the infrastructure of a town is as retail friendly as possible – that means that parking is available and cost-effective, that the town is clean and well presented, that public transport links are strong and that signage is effective.

These infrastructure topics are important, but there is also a danger that they become the sole focus of retail discussion. Local retailers love a debate about whether parking should be cheaper or more plentiful (spoiler alert, the answer is usually ‘yes’) but that can be a tough problem to solve for councils and in any case is not a quick fix. Outlining clear objectives for the physical infrastructure of the town is important, but can’t be the only focus of High Street support.

The second ‘layer’ of action the town can take is more technical, and tougher. This is the business of ensuring that we do as much as possible to ensure that every retail site is occupied and works well for both tenants and customers. That means knowing the landlord of every retail site and understanding their objectives for their properties. It also means knowing all the tenants (the retailers themselves) and understanding how their business is trading and what support they might need. Finally, this ‘property audit’ layer means having a laser-like focus on ‘voids’ (empty properties) and making sure they are actively marketed to the right potential tenants.

That can be difficult. Town councils are very limited in the control they can exert over exactly which type of retailer goes into which property, especially in a town where there are many individual landlords with their own interests. Increasingly, though, councils around the country are taking a more active part in this kind of property marketing – developing an opinion about what kind of new retailing the town needs and then going out and actively seeking it. A town with a clear point of view about its shopping streets can do more to support them.

And the final ‘layer’ of activity we can all collectively take is the ‘marketing and promotion’ layer. What events can we run through the year to bring in visitors beyond just Christmas? How can we harness social media to ensure that retail businesses benefit from each other’s online audiences? How do we organise ourselves to ensure that when someone visits our town for the day, they leave some of their money behind in our tills?

This is a fascinating part of the ‘placemaking’ challenge. If you owned a shopping centre you’d be doing lots of this – creating reasons for customers to come back again and again, and ensuring that your retail line-up was carefully designed to maximise revenues. But for towns, it is harder with disparate landlords and tenants often struggling to come together to make the ‘whole greater than the sum of the parts’.

But it is a challenge worth rising to. Strong High Streets are not just great for retailers and their customers, they are a critical heartbeat at the centre of a community. We let them fade at our peril.

P.S. For more interesting reading on placemaking, check out the High Street Task Force website and the Institute of Place Management.

P.P.S. The whole placemaking topic is hugely important and one where I’d love to get as much diverse input as possible. Please therefore consider sharing this post to your own social network, and of course please do comment below with your views.

1. (This article is a version of one original published in my excellent local paper, the Henley Standard, a couple of weeks ago)