Why do so many British towns basically suck?
The not-so-strange death of the high street.
Something that went to paying subscribers in November 2023.
Last year I went to Bedford, which as opening lines go is not quite up there with “Last night I dreamt of Manderley”, but you work with what you’ve got. I like wandering round random British towns once in a while: I tell myself it’s research for a long-term project that would involve writing or talking about them, but the honest truth is that it’s basically a nerd’s minibreak.
Bedford had been on the list for a while, because it’s easy to get to from London, and because I’d seen some pictures of the riverside looking quite lovely. And the town is midway between two ancient university cities, in the “Oxford-Cambridge arc” that Tory ministers periodically liked to tell us will provide our prosperity (all the while blocking all the housing, transport or lab space that might actually make that happen). So between one thing and another, I was expecting somewhere that felt, if not dripping with prosperity, then at least comfortable
That was not how it felt. The walk from the station into town felt faintly depressed, and took me past a series of grim post-war tower blocks, which reminded of the uglier and less-celebrated side of brutalism. Beyond lay the same cold, half-empty shopping precincts you could find anywhere, with department stores standing shuttered and an upsetting number of nail bars and vape shops. The town still had plenty going for it: the riverside and parks are genuinely beautiful; the Higgins is one of the best local museums I’ve been to in ages, combining local history and art with whatever random rubbish some local bigwig had collected before dying childless. Still, though, for a county town with history stretching back to the Anglo-Saxons, it was a little underwhelming.
There may have been specific reasons for this. Bedford is just up the road from Luton, one of poorest major settlements in the south east of England: that, perhaps, should have tipped me off that this might not be the booming commuter town I’d imagined. Nonetheless, this was not a place to which my standard explanation for why so many towns feel depressed – a lack of graduate jobs, leading to an outflow of young people – seems to apply. Bedford is a commuter town, offering relatively cheap housing and a lot of trains to London. And yet much of it still felt miserable as hell.
All of which got me thinking – why do so many British towns feel depressed these days? What’s going wrong?
One possible explanation is the shift to online retail. That was already on the rise, pre-pandemic, but exploded during lockdown for fairly obvious reasons, and never quite fell back to previous levels. Another possibility is the impact of the pandemic itself. That meant a lot of businesses went under, from months of enforced closure or vastly reduced footfall. It also hit previously successful cities – those with vast numbers of jobs – because the people who’d normally commute in are often now working from home. And this, according to the Centre for Cities, has meant a reduction in spending, rather than simply moving it to new places: “Footfall and spending data show no clear signs of a work from home dividend for suburban high streets.”
That fine think tank has done a lot of work in this area, and concluded that the effect of internet retail has been overstated: it may hit grocery outlets; it should have less impact on “experience” shopping, or the hospitality industry. As of June 2021, it notes, vacancy rates in sizable cities varied by a factor of three, running from 10% in Brighton to 33% in Newport. From this, it concluded that “more online shopping does not necessarily mean more empty shops… What really matters is the affluence of the local economy”.
Vacancy rates, in other words, are a symptom of broader economic health: cities with more high-value jobs have more shops and restaurants, too, because their people have more disposable income. This is, as it happens, the conclusion of every CfC report, just as the conclusion of every sermon is, “Jesus!”
All this, no doubt, is a part of the puzzle, but I’m not convinced it’s all of it. There may not be that many high-value jobs in Bedford, but there are plenty going in London, a city which can be reached in half a dozen trains every hour. Many of the people who live in those lovely big houses on the banks of the River Ouse almost certainly do those jobs. Yet this has not translated into a thriving commercial centre.
So I suspect there are a couple of other factors at work here. How many towns have you been to, which have both a nice shopping centre, and a grim shopping centre? Occasionally the council or a business improvement district will pour money into tarting up the grim shopping centre: but this doesn’t improve the town, it just moves what affluence it has about. In the same way, the long-term rise of out of town shopping centres it’s easy to drive to – malls, retail parks, in Bedford’s specific case Milton Keynes – mean money is simply going elsewhere. Whether online retail is the culprit or not, many towns just have too much retail space.
Why, then, isn’t spare retail property being turned into other things: much-needed housing, say, or the “experience” economy? (Bars, cafes, galleries and so forth.) Part of it may be the planning system; part of it that the people most likely to engage in the experience economy are likely to be younger, and a lot of retail centres seem determined to repel rather than attract teenagers.
And part of it may be the inflexibility of the property market. Perhaps a retail space is not worth what it was, but its landlord doesn't want to change its usage as that would require investment. In the same way – I’m speculating here, but not, I think, inaccurately – they don’t want to drop their rents as that would mean crystallising losses. Better to have things stand empty than to tell your financial backers your portfolio is worth less than you thought.
Or perhaps there’s a much simpler explanation for all of this. A big reason many towns feel depressed is because a few big chains – Debenhams; Wilkos – have gone under, leaving huge empty spaces. Perhaps the issue is that, after the crash, and austerity, and Brexit, and covid, we’re just not as rich as we thought.
Thanks to John Oxley for the chat which inspired some of this.
Self-promotion corner
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