Town & Country Planning, May 2006
I remember when we first came up with the phrase ‘clone town’. It was in the rather stuffy meeting room we then occupied at the New Economics Foundation, and we were discussing the report Ghost Town Britain we were planning to publish later that year.
“What we should do next,” said my colleague Andrew Simms, “is a report called Clone Town Britain about why everywhere is looking the same.”
We all made noises of vague agreement, parked the idea, and the report – the first of a series – was actually published in the autumn of 2004.
It’s a strange phenomenon. Sometimes you have to name something before everyone notices it, and once we had published the phrase ‘coone town’, it seemed to stick.
I know this because I keep on hearing it on the radio and reading it in the press. The actual Clone Town Britain reports received the most enormous publicity. The Today programme broadcast a whole edition on the subject from the unsuspecting town of Boston in Lincolnshire.
And now, while we are feeling a little apologetic about using a phrase we invented, I suddenly heard the city editor of a well-known conservative-leaning national newspaper saying on Radio 4: “Well, nobody wants a lot of ghastly clone towns,”
Indeed they don’t. Now an all-party group of MPs have come out with much the same proposals. The Evening Standard have launched their Save Our Small Shops Campaign and, when the Local Works campaign organised a small meeting in a Dorset market town on the subject, 500 people showed up.
Something is definitely in the air, and it may be that Tesco and the biggest monopolists will find themselves under some new restrictions. But don’t let us pretend that that is going to change the situation very much by itself.
For one thing, the takeover of Ottakars by Waterstone’s – which already have a market share of the retail book trade of nearly a third, and more than that in Scotland – looks set to be nodded through by our sleeping competition regulators.
Second, the horrendous rent rises faced by small businesses nearly everywhere – under the slash and burn style of rack-renting now preferred by the majority of UK landlords – looks set to continue.
Third, many local authorities still do not know how to work out what kind of retail investments are best for their local economies. They still believe – rather like third world dictators – that their crumbling markets are somehow an embarrassment, and what they need is a major retail development which will make them look the same as everywhere else.
In fact, the reverse is rue. Our research into the economic impact of London’s markets shows that they actually generate very large sums of money for the local economy.
Lewisham market, for example, generates about £3.6 million a year, and that is on top of the £5 million a year spent at the market stalls.
Queen’s Market, now under threat from Newham Council, sustains about 900 jobs – three times as many as the retail development that is planned to replace it.
Not only that, but Lewisham market is a third cheaper than the local supermarket. While the headline investment in big retailers tends to drain money out of local economies, and replace independent and flexible jobs with part-time, low skill ones.
Using the LM3 tool, which measures how much money in the local economy gets re-spent and re-circulated there – as some local authorities are starting to do – does provide a way for them to look at the real impact of their high street decisions.
When they do, we might begin to see some progress towards enhancing the distinctiveness – and therefore the economic sustainability – of our town centres.
These things are absolutely obvious to most people, yet elected councillors seem able to go through the veil of forgetfulness the moment they sit in their seats in the council chamber.
Hence the rage behind the peculiar story of the curse laid on the councillor responsible for the new retail development in Bury St Edmunds, by a group claiming to be the spiritual heirs of the saint whose name the town bears.
It is worth reminding any new councillors, elected this month, that there is a bottom line. Clone towns in the end make us poor, because people want to live and invest in places that feel authentic. Monopoly retailers drain money out of the local economy, local markets re-circulate it.
One makes you temporarily rich and then poor; one makes you sustainably better of. Let them choose.