Welcome to The Living High Street (Pt. 2)
The UK’s great retail revival starts with people
We believe that retailers should focus on customers, not technology, to revive the high street. But they can’t do it alone.
A high street isn’t a solitary enterprise. One store being innovative cannot turn a community around. And though retail is the heart of the high street, the few success stories show that landlords, the council and users themselves all have a role to play.
So national chains and independent stores, councils and local enterprise partnerships, heritage bodies and estate owners all have a stake and should all have a voice. We need to bring them together and equip them with more collaborative ways of working.
Our vision of the High Street is one where these people work together to find what’s unique about their area and community, and create a high street that works for all parties in different ways.
Welcome to the Living High Street.
A day in the life of Louise — a working Mum
09.00: Louise runs a daily morning meeting with her team in Zizzi’s Meeting House & Kitchen.
12.30: She meets colleagues at M&S Foodhall for lunch. She loves the vegan sausage roll from local bakers Dermot’s Dough.
13.30: She grabs a 4k projector from 3 To Go, picking it up at the desk by scanning a code on her phone.
A day in the life of Dermot — owner of Dermot’s Dough, a local SME
10.00: Dermot meets his team at WHSmith Skill Zone for training on a new ePos system he’s renting from 3 To Go.
12.00: Helps with the lunchtime rush at M&S Foodhall. They run out of Eccles Cakes, so he uses the Living High St app to arrange a local delivery.
15.00: Meets a rep from a clean energy supplier he’s thinking of switching to at Zizzi’s Meeting House & Kitchen.
A day in the life of Salman — the Living High St’s local government rep
09.00: Weekly standup at Zizzi’s Meeting House & Kitchen with the street’s store managers. Each week, they share footfall and behavioural data, agree any community events for that week, and work through a list of applicants for retail space to see which ones might add to their shared purpose.
13.00: Reviews results of retailers’ experience experiments that focus on getting parents with young children to come to the high street.
14.00: Meets up with the The Living High Street Influencers — a group of store managers, landlords and residents — who raise concerns about security on the high street. They co-create some trial solutions with store managers.
What could this lead to? Councils and landlords creating greater flexibility in rental contracts; which permits more store innovation on the high street; which drives footfall and spend; which drives local investment and enriches the council and landlords; and so on and so forth.
This kind of multi-party collaboration is hard. And we know that, because we’ve done it.
Our work with Heathrow, Landsec and in the Borough of Croydon all involved multiple stakeholders in heavily regulated environments. And yet we’ve shown that bringing these parties together in the right way, and with the right tools, can generate millions in saved productivity costs and growth.
Behind great innovation are great people, equipped with the right ways of working. We believe that this is the key to opening up a new era of innovation on the UK high street.
