Town & Country Planning, April 2007
‘Victory for shop owners as council vows to protect street from ‘clones’.’ That was one headline in the Evening Standard this week, stuffed away behind the Budget coverage.
It was referring to Wandsworth Council’s decision to act to preserve the character of Northcote Road, a mildly charming shopping street next to Wandsworth Common, on the fashionable borders of Clapham where street after street of terraced housing is masked by restored window shutters and 4X4s.
I used to spend most of my Saturday mornings in Northcote Road in a small Italian café with a mixed group of environmentalists, most of whom have gone onto prominent careers in various corners of the green movement.
The Italian café has gone – a victim of the clones – and these days, Northcote Road has become something of a caricature of itself. Little cafes, children’s book shops, market stalls selling cheese. The occasional celebrity. But I have great sympathy with people like Prunella Scales and Jack Dee who have campaigned to protect it.
The difficulty is that Wansworth’s prescription, though laudable, seems highly unlikely to tackle the basic problem, which is burgeoning rents, driven up by one of the most destructive sectors of our current economy: the landlords.
They want to use planning powers to steer major chains towards Clapham Junction, which is fair enough. They want to review parking rules, which might help a little, but not much. They want changes in national policy to create ‘safe zones’ for independent shops – well, don’t we all. They are also talking vaguely about a community trust to protect the road, which is too ill-defined really to work out what it means.
None of these will really tackle the inexorable process whereby shopping streets attract customers, rents rise, and the kind of ‘real’ shops that first attracted them there are forced out. Nor is it possible to imagine a policy that might tackle this without returning to local authorities their lost discretion over business rates, which might provide some kind of lever.
But Wandsworth – which is hardly Marxist-Leninist – is trying, and there is no doubt that there is a rising wave of rage about the loss of character of our local high streets. But what interests me is this gap between the ambition to tackle an issue and the political means by which something can be done.
The centre of my rather amorphous Saturday morning group in Northcote Road was my colleague Andrew Simms, whose book Tescopoly is out this month – and very good it is (though I have to declare an interest because I’m thanked in the acknowledgements).
Andrew goes for the heart of the clone town problem (a phrase he coined himself), identifying it in the massive centralised and technocratic systems that Tesco and heir rivals disguise. But, once again, it comes up against the same problem as Northcote Road: how do you translate that into terms which politicians can understand and act upon.
Because politics is conducted in a language of measures and proposals. The media understands buzzwords like clone towns, but politicians only grasp it in terms of specific problems, specific statistics and specific measures. And they don’t really prick up their ears until they hear what you propose.
But the proposals, as in the case of Northcote Road, inevitably fall short of the problem. The glory of British politics – its sheer practicality, its intense pragmatism – is also its undoing.
This is as true for the politics of localism as it is for local issues like high streets. The process of political change means that we persuade the politicians to get involved by conjuring up proposals around which people unite. But it should be no surprise that these do not quite fit the problem, which then transmutes and has to be tackled again.
Sometimes over and over again.
The great campaigner William Morris noticed this process in his Dream of John Ball, where he imagines the man who inspired the Peasant’s Revolt discussing “how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men fight for what they meant under another name.”
That seems to me to be the grammar of change, and it is a grammar we are remarkably ignorant of. We don’t see the patterns whereby change happens and we don’t use them, and so the process goes on going around.
The paradox of localism is that you can see the problem that needs to be tackled more clearly at local level, yet the levers to pull are elsewhere – and when you get high enough up the ladder to pull them, mysteriously your eyes begin to cloud, and the levers slip through your fingers.
It has all the makings of a fairy tale. But while we wait for the handsome prince, our high streets wither away into vacuous nowhere places and we fear our lives are going the same way. It’s an uncomfortable feeling.