Death of the high street? Hurrah…

Emma Duncan
27 April 2014
The Observer
Move with the times. Turn empty shops into much needed housing
During a slump, businesses in most parts of the economy get knocked sideways. It is during the recovery that you see which sectors are going to thrive in the long run, and which are going to wither. The data currently trickling in suggest that manufacturing, construction and financial and business services are doing pretty well. But there is one bit of the economy that shows little sign of life: that is the high street.
The problem is not that people have given up buying stuff. Figures out last week showed that retail sales grew 4.2% in the year to March. It’s because they buy stuff online. Over the past four years, while online spending has grown by around 75%, sales from bricks-and-mortar shops have been flat, according to Verdict Retail, a consultancy.
That figure includes modern shopping centres, which have been doing reasonably well. On the high street, spending has been falling. According to the Centre for Retail Research, nearly 300 retailing firms, including big brands such as Comet, Barratts, Blockbuster, have gone under since 2007, with around 25,000 stores affected. We are no longer a nation of shopkeepers.
That online retailing is gaining at the expense of the bricks-and-mortar stuff is hardly hot news, but this shift gets more airtime than that from, say, offline to online gambling because it has bigger social implications. Our communities were, literally, built around our high streets: shops, located at the centre of our villages and towns for practical reasons, became the places where we met, gossiped and flirted.
Some of our grandest architecture was designed for retail: the elegant sweep of Regent Street, John Nash’s masterpiece, was one of the world’s first shopping malls. The retail business gets a starring role in some of our great novels, from Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop to Milsom Street in Bath, where Jane Austen’s heroines bought hats and batted their eyelids at their beaux.
That’s why the need to pump life into our high streets is one of the few issues on which the political parties agree. The government signed up nice Mary Portas to tell it what to do and forked out money for towns with good ideas about how to jolly up their high streets. Ed Miliband has promised to help small shopkeepers by freezing their rates.
But none of this is going to make a bit of difference. The sums the government is offering are piffling, most of the money has not been spent and there are no signs of the decline being arrested. Yet the main problem with the scheme is not its failure, but its underlying motivation. It exemplifies our tendency to romanticise the past and to refuse to embrace a decent opportunity when it jumps into our laps and flings its arms around our neck.
Retail’s move from bricks and mortar to the internet brings two large benefits. One is that the hours we once spent shopping can now be filled by reading 19th-century novels, making Viking ships out of toothpicks, getting drunk, passing on malicious gossip, staring at the ceiling or doing any of the many things that are more amusing than trailing round supermarket aisles trying to remember the thing we forgot to get last time.
I know some people like shopping. That’s fine. There will always be shops for them to shop in. But for people like me who would rather have all their toenails removed than stand in crowded changing rooms staring at the lumpy bits we would rather not expose to public scrutiny, the rise of internet shopping is one of the great joys of modernity.
Other than to buy a sandwich, I haven’t been to a shop since one of my daughters inveigled me into the Westfield shopping centre in White City, west London, shortly before Christmas. Watching so much money being wasted on so much tat brought me closer to an understanding of al-Qaida’s desire to destroy western civilisation than I have been before or hope to be again.
The other benefit of the rise of internet shopping is that it frees up valuable property for other uses. Buildings in the high street do not have to be occupied by retailers. They can also be used for housing, which we are rather short of in much of the country.
Many local authorities are reluctant to allow retail space to be converted into residential units. Their objections are understandable. Shops provide jobs. But those jobs are going forever and no amount of government grants for prettifying high streets will bring them back.
Instead of trying to keep uneconomic commercial areas going, we should celebrate the fact that we can use the space vacated by retailers to house people currently condemned to live in overpriced rabbit hutches.
But what will replace the social glue that high streets have provided? How will we get to know each other if we no longer bump into each other in the greengrocer’s? Won’t the death of the high street destroy our communities?
Community is not being destroyed: it is changing, as it always has done. It is different now from the way it was in Middlemarch. In the 19th century, the railway allowed people to travel, widened their horizons and at the same time broke up the tight-knit village communities that formed the backdrop to George Eliot’s novels. People bemoaned the change at the time, yet as their horizons widened, they built different, geographically scattered communities.
Much the same is happening now. Because we no longer do much of our shopping in our neighbourhoods, we know our neighbours less well than we used to; but the technology that is killing the high street allows us to cultivate friendships with people on the other side of the planet who share our interests. To my mind, we are gaining more than we are losing.
The urge to cling to the past is understandable, but dangerous. If we indulge in it too much, we may fail to make the best of the present.
Emma Duncan is deputy editor of the Economist