Welcome to The Living High Street (Pt. 3)
One year on from the UK’s retail meltdown, what’s changed?
Last Summer, we put forward a practical plan to save the high street. Urging embattled retailers to drive footfall by embracing experience experiments, rather than big technology bets. And we believed that a cause like reviving the UK High Street could unite a range of stakeholders.
There were two big principles behind the ideas that we wanted to drive home.
- Retailers need to recognise the value of store space has changed. Void or otherwise, they need to use them to create ‘experience experiments’ that will serve actual customer needs, drive footfall, and create product demand.
- High streets need a ‘brain trust’ — businesses, residents, local government, SMEs, estate owners — that commit to working together to create a purpose for the high street that meets the needs of its users.
Not everyone bought our ideas, but the principles got a lot of attention.
So what have we seen in the 12 months since?
The government agrees with us.
It’s not often you can say this in innovation, but government is ahead of businesses.
In December they announced the Future High Streets fund — a £675m fund for renewing the UK High Street. Specifically they’re looking for high streets that ‘tie into a broader economic market, demonstrating evidence of strong local leadership, partnership working and joined up thinking across the local authority to deliver regeneration in their town centre area’. Startlingly close to our principles.
We spoke to some councils preparing applications and the challenge is finding the right solution for the right area. Some councils are looking to sustain existing development plans: others need to renew key assets like transport infrastructure.
Regardless, to ensure that the investment money isn’t frittered away they will need to embed the appropriate ways of working with stakeholders. And it’s unclear who will help with that. Perhaps the mooted High Street Task Force. Though unless this Task Force numbers in the 100s, they’re going to be awfully stretched across the UK.
Retailers are planning but not acting.
As recent announcements from Boots, Ted Baker, Jamie’s Italian and Arcadia Group prove, the hammer hasn’t fully fallen yet. Many brands will wait until the dust has settled to start reinventing themselves, wary of balking investors and wanting to have a Big, Thorough, Strategic Plan.
The thing is, The Plan Sucks.
Creating the conditions for success is important. But that has to be matched with creating what success looks like. In 2019, they could be making small, experimental investments that will create momentum, internal learning and start change happening…rather than waiting until 2020 to announce a plan, a rollout, a partnership with a tech company.
By which time, consumers will have become increasingly disinterested, staff will have left, the City will have sharpened its claws…and there’ll be a new set of macroeconomic conditions, competitors and unforeseen disruption.
Which will require the plan to be re-planned.
Amazon kills the High Street, Amazon saves the High Street
Amazon get blamed for the death of retail — people seem to think that the tax-slipping tech giant wants nothing more than to see our high streets deserted and their delivery vans everywhere. But their latest announcement offers an alternative view.
Amazon are funding a year-long pilot of 10 pop up spaces around the UK, offering 100 of its top-performing online-only sellers a shot at physical retail. They’re also investing £1m in a new SME apprenticeship fund, and offering training via the Amazon Academy to leave an SME retail legacy.
It seems that no one wants to see the turnaround of the high street more than they do. Perhaps, they get the role that bricks-and-mortar plays in modern retail better than most retailers.
Our focus to 2020: Placemaking
The high street isn’t a solitary enterprise. One store being innovative cannot turn a community around. And though retail is at the heart of the high street, the few success stories show that others have a role to play.
What seems to be missing — what Amazon have cottoned onto — is that any given High Street is a messy congregation of interests, and lacks a central ‘conductor’ role that can provide guidance and a point of ‘plug in’. We had imagined councils might play that role, but we now realise that they are under even worse pressure than retailers.
We think that landowners have the business imperative, oversight and capabilities to be the conductor of new high streets.
Landowners are the platform for retailers ‘apps’. They create a varied, effortless usage experience. And they help developers to create more of what people want. Which helps them to enhance the value of an asset over time.
Increasingly, ‘Placemakers’ make big investments in more localised areas, aiming to make massive returns in the long-term. That means they need to make an area attractive, thriving and differentiated.
They have oversight across a mixed use area, catering to residents, visitors, business owners and local services. They’re the service layer: creating the infrastructure, transport and capitalisation required to create retail innovation.
There’s a huge opportunity for landowners. By providing footfall and dwell data, new flexible rental agreements, and a clear purpose that serves the community’s needs they might lead a transformation in public retail spaces.
It’ll be interesting to see how owners of mixed-use spaces and retailers, as they emerge from the financial gloom, push forward and seek to drive real change.
