Video didn’t kill the radio star…so will the internet REALLY kill the High Street?

‘Bulldoze the high street and build a giant park: is Stockton the future of Britain?’ was the article in the Guardian on 11th February 2021.

This post isn’t about Stockton. Not really. Stockton and the provocation in the Guardian’s article have inspired some interesting on-line, and no doubt off-line, discussion on the future of our towns' and neighborhoods' centres. Stockton, this headline would have us believe, has an imagination the size of a colossal wrecking ball (and corresponding lack of sustainability agenda conscience).

In Scotland, there is a healthy debate and increasing movement towards re-learning what ‘Place’ actually is and how we can embrace the opportunities, as well as the constraints, that the internet is having on the way we all live, shop, work and spend our free time.

But it’s not just the advent of the internet. Post 2008, macro-economic free market fundamentalism is in free fall too. ‘Moral hazard’ has yet to be addressed. Big business can according to the record, be too big to fail. 

Really? That, together with a climate crisis, overlapping multiple health crises and Brexit of course, has implications for everything and everyone.

In a recent Independent study for the Scottish Government, A New Future for Scotlands Town Centres the Town Centre Action Plan Review Group Report, chaired by Leigh Sparks, set out some really very interesting research into what’s going on as a result of the Pandemic, Brexit and also the trends already well underway with the advent of the Internet. It’s definitely worth a read. 

Extrapolating from the conclusions: The High Street isn’t an all or nothing proposition. Stop press! Who Knew! It is, and always has been, an ever-changing feature of how people have lived since we moved from hunter gathering communities to settle and settlement. It’s simply changing. And that brings opportunity – providing we look to all the richly complex and truly granular human needs issues that come to play in any given place.

Big is blunt. Big is high stakes risk. And Big, it turns out, is fragile. So do we need to look to antifragile, what makes us collectively stronger in times of emergency and why until relatively recently, settlement and community centres have been at the heart of our communities? Do we really not want to create the conditions for small enterprise to thrive and for people to be sheltered from both the increasingly extreme weather we’re all facing? For first time buyers to afford a flat close to what they need without owning a car? Or the economic needs for people to trade ideas and experiences to earn a fair living?

In a healthy, diverse ecosystem, when a big tree falls, other species on the forest floor have more light to thrive. But it would be to stretch that metaphor if the ecosystem we’re considering is in fact, a settlement centre including a High Street. We’re not literally talking trees in beautiful rolling parkland are we? Ahh. I may have spotted a problem…

Are High Streets really just about shopping? I don’t see it that way. I see High Streets as community centres, meeting a richer and more complex range of human needs. It’s worth taking a deep dive into the form historic places in northern hemisphere localities take (Or simply crossing the High Street in Stockton). And then asking why it takes the form it has taken for hundreds of years? 

While there are few hard and fast ‘rules’, there are some fundamental basics. Shhhh in some places, the rain comes in sideways – certainly in Scotland. Our ancestors knew that, for they didn’t have aircon cars with sat nav. and hence the nature of the enclosure they created. But what are cars really doing to us? And has that influenced our decision-making? I think we’ve lost the art and science of creating micro-climate. Of creating the essential conditions for a diversity of people and small businesses to thrive. That doesn’t exclude parks and green space. On the contrary, we know nature matters - as part of that diverse mix of needs. But it absolutely does recognize the diversity and complexity of what we need to thrive collectively – not always well served by the blunt tool which is a wrecking ball over a very large footprint.

So ‘Video didn’t really kill the radio star’. That would have been silly, as it turns out. Perhaps we should all take a step back from our stressed and consequently polarized predisposition towards 'black and white', 'fight or flight', thinking. Let’s appreciate that this is not an all or nothing proposition. Healthy, community and small business supporting Places are complex. Surely they deserve the time and research for us to respond accordingly?

No, is therefore my answer. It’s not the future for High Streets across Britain. One large size doesn’t fit all – and it’s definitely questionable whether this grand park with ‘green washed’ roofscape, stealth mono-blocks, really are the answer for the folks of Stockton.

No, is therefore my answer. It’s not the future for High Streets across Britain. One large size doesn’t fit all – and it’s definitely questionable whether this grand park with ‘green washed’ roofscape, stealth mono-blocks, really are the answer for the folks of Stockton.