The Need for Centring: The Future of the High Street

Our high streets were suffering before the pandemic, but the last year has ravaged them. Shifts towards e-commerce show no signs of slowing down, so we must ask ourselves what is the high street for and how can we build community centres that matter? Patch team member Ella Cheney shares her perspective.

The Decline of Retail

According to Guardian research, 11,000 retail and hospitality outlets closed in 2020. The loss of Arcadia and Debenhams have been particularly crushing for workers that had already been on furlough for months already and the loss of the department store has been the latest blow to our traditional conceptions of high street retail.

PWC have suggested that even this number is an underestimate. Our data relies on permanent closures and it is yet to be seen whether many temporarily closed outlets will return.

There are some saving graces. The Guardian research found that independent outlets only represented around 10% of those that permanently closed. The lockdown spirit has brought an increased support in sustaining local indies and town centres are perceived by some as safer than bigger regional outlets.

Some retailers are also maintaining their physical location through a renewed focus on experience. New York City’s Nike retail store has a football training centre in the basement, and it is difficult to imagine the scents of Lush shifting wholly online immediately. While some retailers will undoubtedly find ways to innovate their way into high street relevance, high street flight reminds us that the rise of ecommerce is a process, not an event.

What are Town Centres For?

Given retail’s prior domination of high streets and town centres, it seems we are at a turning point in our cultural consciousness - if we don’t have shops what exactly are town centres for? If the answer is food and drink, why not scatter them through a community, versus having to be centred in one place?

Prince Charles’ famous (or notorious, depending who you ask) Poundbury town development in England has taken this approach. Poundbury’s design and planning philosophy eschews any form of zoning, aiming for mixed use of spaces across retail, hospitality, office and residential spread across the town.

But it has also been widely ridiculed for its strange, centrally organised, faux parochial whimsy. The fire station, which Charles was involved in designing, even received a nomination for the Carbuncle Cup.

Perhaps it is the constraints of an upbringing in a traditional market town talking, but I find the vision of centrally planned towns painfully stale. My sadness at the gutting of a physical centre of town communities could just be a combination of childhood nostalgia and lack of imagination, but it seems to be something more.

The presence of a town centre is a town planning device that is both deeply British and a cultural connection with the rest of Europe. While the value of innovation in our community spaces cannot be underestimated, neither can the value of tradition.

The traditional orientation of people who lived where we do now, since the medieval times, has been oriented around some kind of centre. This anchoring in the past is more than just respect for a certain way of living, it is an emotional connection with what came before.

I am not so naive as to advocate for centring on the basis of the relatively modern shopping centre. The dominance of retail is, in historical terms, a pretty modern phenomenon that hasn’t even extended itself across the continent.

My grandparents live on the border of Almeria and Murcia in Spain, down a dirt rambler that resembles a river with the lightest touch of rain, and in a valley where your nearest neighbour sits half a mile away. Water can be delivered cheaply by truck, but everyone still goes to the spring.

The spring is housed in a long thin white building with a terracotta roof where you can collect drinking water, surrounded by communal gardens. The ladies of the village bring their laundry and washboards and chatter and laugh together in rapid Spanish with a deeply southern twang.

The well spring is not a ‘centre’ we know in our British suburbs and towns, but it is their centre, and it means something.

I am not advocating for a country-wide well-dig and return to washboards but this example speaks to a need for a space of spaces of unorganised connection- a physical heart of our communities. In the post-pandemic world of remote work this need for physical centring is perhaps more vibrant than ever, anchoring us into being a physical part of the places that we call home.

Reimagining the Town Centre

In this sense, the decline of retail has gifted us the rare opportunity to collectively reimagine what the heart of our towns should be.

Increasingly, the answer to this seems to be a community hub. This might be fewer chain shops and restaurants imposing their view of community space, and more community-led and community-collaborative initiatives designing local spaces as locals want and need them. There are many examples we can turn to for inspiration.

Anfield has seen a community-led project homebaked that saved the local bakery from demolition and then reinvigorated it turning it into a community hub.

Anfield residents seem to have caught the community-first bug. The Homebaked project has been followed by Kitty’s launderette, a social enterprise that, in a modern twist on the spring in Huercal-Overa, offers free services to the elderly and vulnerable and aims to be a gathering space where the community can lounge and chat.

These community projects share not only a community-led focus on creating spaces for social interaction, but also a belief in the regeneration of heritage.

Homebaked saved a much loved bakery that had been around since 1903 and Kitty’s is running a heritage project collecting stories from residents about the history of washing spaces and launderettes and their community importance in Liverpool. Anfield residents are now trying to crowdfund the restoration of the beloved Anfield Community cinema, creating yet another space for the local community.

The residents of Todmorden a town in Yorkshire have similarly taken their shared spaces into their own hands. A community group called the Incredible Edible Todmorden have taken to turning their town into one big free-for-all community garden, with a bee hive in a pollinator garden and herb planters at the train station.

Travellers are encouraged to pull weeds out while waiting for their trains and the group campaigns for everyone to shop local and learn the names of your greengrocers and cafe owners. Todmordeners spread their gospel to other towns by offering speaking services to other community groups looking to set up community gardens.

Emerging from lockdown, the public mood is balancing both a deep-seated need for connection and a renewed sense of the important things in life. In the past months as our lives have been in the slow lane there has been a national conversation about the failures of consumerism and the benefits of greener lifestyles.

The residents of Todmorden and Anfield were, in this sense, ahead of the game, moving away from commercialised shared spaces towards community-driven projects made for and by the community.