After retail — the future for malls and high streets

What’s the future for high streets, malls and retail parks? On Twitter this morning a few of us were talking about the ease with which big box retail parks or indoor malls could be converted to indoor uses. We ranged from footfall to floor loading limits, and beyond; one thing everyone in the conversation was agreed upon was that it’s a conversation that needs to be had now.

The changes in retail that have been happening for ten years have been accelerated by the measures required to mitigate the spread of Covid 19. How we move our high streets from the monocultural dependence on retail to an unpredictable future is very much a live issue.

I work in Berwick upon Tweed. Our high street has had issues of under-occupied and empty properties for all of the last ten years. The causes are not simply the rise of out of town shopping and consumers preference for it, but also the changing demands of businesses, and the inability or unwillingness of landlords to renew and modernize their properties.

If these are the problems we’ve had on a small scale in Berwick (although the impact of a small number of persistently empty properties on perceptions of the high street is disproportionate, and entirely negative) then these problems are going to be multiplied as the changes in retail progress throughout England and Wales.

Change is nothing new. The real question is whether the solutions to change are binary, or multiple, or mixed. Let me give you an example. The government has recently announced that it wants to use the planning system to make it easier to convert retail or commercial properties to residential use. For small towns in attractive locations that could be superficially attractive, especially for individual landlords, but it might accelerate the decline of retail as footfall declines and the retail offer becomes more fragmented.

It’s a binary of course; an attractive binary, but it’s not the only solution. Let me give you some examples of alternatives. Before lockdown, I was in Newcastle and sat in an almost silent Bigg Market and looked at the commercial buildings around me. The decline of the area as a commercial environment, and its over reliance on an alcohol led night time economy that looks increasingly like a problem rather than a solution, looks like a future regeneration project in the making. For sure, the underused upper stories of those buildings would make attractive apartments, but is that the only solution?

I reflected on the pre-history of town centres, and their development before mass retail became a thing. Anyone who’s looked at old maps of places like Berwick, or Newcastle can still see the shadow of medieval burgage plots, places of production that created a money driven commercial economy and were the engines of development and growth. While sitting in Bigg Market I also reflected on the kinds of businesses I like, that draw me to town centres. Mainly they’re the businesses that provide services that are tailored to what I want rather than off the peg retail. Want an example? There’s a small business round the corner from my house that still thrives on doing alterations to clothing, putting new zips into old trousers, raising hems or adjusting seams. This week I took delivery of a custom made cycling jacket, in a size and shape that wasn’t available off the peg. Will flying stuff like that in from Italy always be an option if air travel becomes more expensive or international trade more prone to friction?

My perception is that just as fast fashion and mass retail occupies one part of the retail market, so a desire for customization and individual choice is also a key driver in the current market. Do I stop for a Gregs sandwich wrapped in cellophane or pop into that nice place that will do me Italian salami and ham with a light salad on untoasted focaccia?

My thought, sitting in Bigg Market was about what might happen if a landlord converted one of those under used buildings into a workshop on the ground floor, and offered the upper floors as an apartment to the tenants of the workshop. For sure, clothing alterations might not make enough money, but in the space available there are other options. Like my mad idea to set up and run a custom 3 d printing business, making bespoke components for bikes, or phone cases, or iPad holders. (Cyclists are a great example of the desire for customization — if you can’t buy customized Garmin mounts or bidon cages in team colours yet, it’s only a matter of time, and I’ll be in that queue.)

The point isn’t that I’ve had a great business idea (I suspect I haven’t, because of 3d printing technology not being quite up to it at an economical price yet) but that our high streets used to include a component of what might now pass for light industry, repairing shoes, or clothes, or doing small scale engineering for the public. So is that a third alternative to retail or housing? I’d suggest the success of firms like Timpsons might suggest that’s a possibility, and might generate footfall that is more than just people passing through. The number of mobile phone repair shops on the high street, usually in low rent fringe properties, suggests it’s an option that might grow rather than shrink.

That’s an interesting thought about high streets. What about shopping malls? As a kid, growing up in Cwmbran, the upper levels of the multi story car parks that ringed the town centre made excellent improvised cycling tracks. If you have a shopping mall with space to spare, or an under utilized car park as retail demand reduces, is a running track on the upper floor or a velodrome on the roof of your car park a possible option? (There’s a great article about New York’s indoor running tracks here — and anyone who’s seen Street Velo’s events in the UK can attest to how simple an improvised velodrome can be.) I haven’t got the time or the space for all the possibilities I’ve seen in the last couple of years, but I love the response of a Berwick resident who when told that a high street property was very dilapidated, suggested taking out the upper floors and turning the shell of the building into an indoor climbing arena within the Victorian facade.

Again, these aren’t worked up business cases — they’re just examples to illustrate the assertion that there may be more options than the binaries being offered by converting retail to housing.

I’m aware I’m venturing into a political arena here, but it’s politics with a small P — the direction of travel in British planning policy, replacing societal needs and value with the primacy of the market and maximizing landlord and landowner revenues, has been bi-partisan since 1979, just as the needs of community and economic development for the many and not the few were a part of the post war consensus that broke so completely in the 1970s.

If you value town centres and the idea of there being places where people meet while going about a variety of errands or purposes, then turning empty shops into houses may not be the best option. As I’ve hinted above, I think that the idea that housing and industry or commerce always have to be separated is anachronistic — sometimes, it seems to me, the solution is better environmental controls, not rigid segregation.

In case you’re asking yourself what that means in practice, so am I. Anecdotally, there appears to be a boom in converting the garages attached to suburban residential homes into home offices, or home gyms. In many cases planning permission isn’t sought, and sometimes isn’t required under permitted development rights. I’m not sure if that’s going to be helpful in the long run, since many housing estates were built on the premise that off street parking provision meant that highways could be built without any provision for on the road parking, but it’s moved me to wonder quite why we don’t require a percentage of housing to have work space as part of its design, or to be flexible enough without compromising other needs.

For about a generation now the model on high streets has been full width frontages that allow no access to the upper floors from the street. Upper floor residential development can be challenging (not least because mortgage companies often look askance at granting standard mortgages to residential properties above commercial developments unless they’re purpose built) but when it’s delivered, it’s on the basis that there will be no link between the residential property and the commercial. I think, without wanting to suggest it’s a universal panacea, that that’s a mistake. If you’re looking to build the high street around independents and a wider mix of activities, then combining work and home might be part of that mix.

I’ll leave one further thought here, and it’s about the future of out of town shopping. We’re playing catch up now, trying to fix the harm done to town centres by the creation of a monocultural retail environment between 1964 and 1990. We should be planning now for what will happen to out of town retail if there are significant changes in consumer behaviour as a result of the current pandemic (with a permanent shift to home delivery or click and collect type services) or longer term, the decline in petrol powered car use after 2030. Government appears to desire a shift to low carbon vehicle fuels, and we don’t know yet if that will lead to either modal shift or different ownership models for private cars, (like shared use or short term rental) but out of town centres with their huge amount of land set aside for parking privately owned single user cars may suddenly become anachronisms.

One thing we can be sure of; waiting for the crisis to break, then trying to make up solutions on the hoof, as we have done with the high street, is not the best option.