Town & Country Planning, March 2013
It is strange, and slightly disturbing, to think that nearly a decade hasgone by since the term ‘clone town’ entered the political dictionary.
Strange because it is not vouchsafed to many of us to run a campaign which effectively enters the language. Disturbing because my forty-something self was closely involved in the campaign that followed the first of Clone Town Britain report from the New Economics Foundation.
It is hard coming to terms with how quickly time passes, sometimes, but how slow things take to change.
The first report came out in 2004 to extraordinary coverage in every kind of media, and newspaper pages full of identical looking high streets.
This was never quiet the intention. The clone town campaign was an economic critique, and the media treated it as an aesthetic one. Perhaps that was inevitable.
I don’t think any of us would have imagined looking forward nine years that the basic message would have trickled down into official consciousness quite as much as it has. But I think I would have been absolutely staggered if anyone had told me that the antidote toClone Town Britain was at hand – and it would be through the euthanasia of the clones.
One by one, and starting with Woolworths, the middle ranking retail chains have begun to shut their doors. The great holes in the high streets used to be small shops of course, but most often they used to be chains.
Why did we get our predictions so wrong? Perhaps we underestimated the growth of online shopping. We certainly never expected a property collapse quite on the scale that emerged, and the scale of the debt they had weighed themselves down with in the glory days of so-called retail-led regeneration. But most of all, we underestimated just how vulnerable the chains had become – how unprepared for change they were, and how much they took their customers for granted.
None of this is completely clear cut, and the old chains are being replaced by new ones – most of them in the great lost tradition of Marks & Spencer which, if your memory stretches back to the 1880s, used to sport the most famous slogan of all: ‘Don’t ask the price; it’s a penny!’
I think we also underestimated how imaginative the local shops would be, when they had actually thought deeply about the future of high streets – as the thriving heart of commercial neighbourhoods, not to mention the new element of showmanship an razzmatazz that would be required.
The truth is that there is a squeezed middle going on. If you are a retail chain which tries to offer everything to everyone, with a combination of a real and online presence, and solid monopolistic aspirations, you are probably fine.
If you are a small store, owned and controlled locally, with a clear idea of what customers need and why they shop there – and a sense of how to enhance a sense of local distinctiveness – you also seem to be fine. It is the great, bland, anonymous, second rate rump in the middle that is in trouble.
This also allows us to peer a little into the future to describe the post-Portas high street.
Some high streets clearly have no future, but many of them do – but it is a different one, dedicated to distinctiveness, spectacle, street markets and occasion – and a clear understanding of what has to be bought locally and what products will always be easier and cheaper via the online clones.
This is a future for high streets as engines of community and cultural regeneration as well as economics, as the core of a revival of what is best locally which seems to have its roots in the increasing demand for authenticity. But for much more than just shopping, but as cultural and recycling centres – and much else besides.
This journal has always been wrestling with the idea of real places, where people can lead more civilised and human lives. And, as far as high streets are concerned – and despite all the funeral rhetoric – it seems to me that history is on the side of Town & Country Planning.