“Planning laws should be changed radically to ensure that retail developments are built in town centres rather than on edge-of-town sites or in the countryside, Mary Portas has said.”

Thus spake the Queen of Shoppers. A certain kind of shopper, mind you. The kind that seeks out the latest Adidas trainers, a cut price Gucci handbag, and fortifies itself in the ‘World of Flavours’ mass nosebag at half time. The clue is in the word ‘built’ – true shopping nirvana evolves to meet the needs of the local inhabitants, it is not ‘built’ to entice the the cloned corporates into paying rent.

Long ago, a farmer by the name of Harry Tuffin, acquired premises opposite the local open market on the sheep droving route to Ludlow. ‘Why, the very place to sell my wares under cover’, he declared.

Being a farmer himself, he understood muddy boots and thrift, so he restricted himself to one light bulb (light bulb, mind, not florescent tube) per gangway; nowt so modish as an ‘aisle’. Dimly lit, you couldn’t see the mud on the floor; could barely find your way to the pallet of butter – some weeks it was next to the cauliflower, some weeks next to the methylated spirits. Goods arrived as they arrived, and went into any spare space. A hand written sign advised you of the probable price, always negotiable, depending on whether your harvest was in or not – Harry understood his customers.

Opposite was a shop, I forget the name, that sold essentials like needle and cotton, wicks for the hurricane lamps, and if you ventured into the back room, rack upon rack of garments, pushed tightly together. There was no need to walk between the racks, for every garment was identical, only the colour ever changed – what price fashion when your nearest neighbour was five miles away – what you needed, once a year, no more, was a fresh cotton wrap over dress to feed the chickens in; and that was all they stocked.

Up in the big city, Ludlow actually, all of fifteen miles away, things were a little more exotic; there was Boddenham’s for the well heeled farmer’s wife looking for a county wedding outfit. Boddenham’s was a collection of timbered houses, joined together by rickety staircases, narrow corridors, lethal changes in floor levels. Ladies ‘undergarments’ was discretely hidden in the attic, far away from the noisy farmers admiring the moleskin trousers.

Next door was a tea rooms, a proper old fashioned tea rooms, with an open fire and beams and everything, full of copper kettles, dressers laden with blue and white china, and crumpets for tea. There was a small kiosk by the door where you could pay for your high tea before setting off home. Then there was Rickards, a century old collection of small houses, linked by gloomy passages, every room of which held mysteries of interest only to the man in search of a whatitsname that held the handle onto the milk pail – the brown coated assistants would scurry off in search of a brown paper wrapped parcel that held at least a dozen of such items. They always knew exactly where to find it – hadn’t they put it there when they started work 40 years before?

There was Griffiths the Butcher who could tell you which field on which farm your leg of lamb came from, and Wall’s, his fierce competitor in the art of sausage making. Proper sausages, full of meat. Perhaps a slice of a ‘Stinking Bishop’ from across the road – your nose could tell you when it was in stock. Maybe a pint or two of ‘Boiling Well’ in the Feathers to see you on your way home again.

All these businesses existed because there was a local need for them. They weren’t built to ‘entice’ shoppers into them, they grew organically in whatever space was available, to sell the things people wanted, needed.

Did I make this sound like nostalgia? It isn’t. A funny thing happened to Ludlow on its way to ‘planning redevelopment’. The Planners discovered that virtually every house, every shop, in Ludlow was a listed building. They couldn’t be pulled down, couldn’t be altered. The multiples came, looked at the rickety stairs, the narrow corridors, the pokey windows, and said ‘where do we put an escalator’ – ‘you don’t’ replied English Heritage.  ‘But we need a 50 foot run of open windows to display our goods, the consultants say it’s essential’. ‘No can do’, said English heritage. ‘And a goods entrance for our three times a day deliveries, our lorries can’t get down that street’. ‘Tough’ said English Heritage,’it stays as it is’.

Anyone who knows Ludlow will tell you that it is thriving – it has become a tourist attraction. Not only are all the above businesses still thriving, still supply everything the farming community needs, but many new businesses have started up to serve the literally thousands of shoppers who flock hundreds of miles to come and marvel at an old fashioned High Street that hasn’t changed one whit.

It was planning law that prevented any ‘redevelopment’ of the High Street. Planning Law that Mary Portas wants to see amended so that Ludlow, the only town in England not to have a ‘shopping mall’, could look the same as all the other down at heel shopping malls.

Dave December 15, 2011 at 21:10

Our town centre is probably on its last legs. How many shops will be able
to afford the next quarter’s rent? The local council is no help. 20 years ago
they managed to get a largish site just off the town centre and tried to
entice a large department/chain store to take it. Then the recession hit.
Eventually they built homes on it.
The last two or three years they’ve been
talking about closing the largest car park in the town and selling the site to
a large department/chain store. Fat chance of that happening because all the
chain stores are opening on the edge of town. Why is that?
Free parking and
it’s 400 yards from the bypass/main link road. All the shoppers go to Tesco
then stop by at all the usual out of town retailers. What they don’t do is try
and venture into the town centre. The traffic system is designed to keep
traffic out of the town centre ( yes the council boasted about how successful
the scheme was) If you manage to find your way into the town you have to pay
to park. It’s expensive compared to the free parking on the edge of town and
the free parking available in all the surrounding towns.
Should you
continue into town what will you find?
Pound shops. Phone shops. Pawn
shops. Charity shops. A small M&S. Card shops. Estate agents. Coffee
shops. And a couple of clothes shops.
The last “department store” TJ Hughes
went bust and has been replaced by a pound shop.

Where are the interesting little shops? The little boutiques? The second
hand book shops? etc etc etc…?
They’re not in my town. There’s a nice town
a few miles away just across the county line that has free parking, nice
architecture and lots of interesting small shops. Should I fancy a morning’s
browsing I go there.

I estimate that 20-30% of the shop units in my town are either on short
leases or are empty. I don’t see them being let any time soon.

My solution would be to level the playing field with the out of town shops
by making the parking free. Business rates should be slashed and rent should
be based on the store’s turnover.
Unfortunately I don’t see that happening
so RIP town centres.

Mudplugger
December 15, 2011 at 21:58

Just a couple of snags with your solution.

‘Levelling the playing-field’ may appeal, but the chances are that would
mean an end to free parking everywhere – that’s the sort of levelling
councils would love to do, level it all upwards. So that just hands even
more business to the on-line e-traders.

Basing rents or rates on turnover is flawed. Turnover is vanity, as they
say. It doesn’t reflect profitability. Profit would be a better measure, but
that’s impossible to derive for any one unit of multiples. Rent is a
commercial deal between a landlord and a tenant, it reflects supply and
demand economics. Business rates are political – both their level and their
channelling – any reductions would need to be compensated by increases
elsewhere, so no winners there.

We have to face facts – the traditional model of town-centre shopping is
finished, whether by natural selection or council ham-fistedness, or both,
but its successor has not yet fully evolved. It will evolve, because folk
will always need to buy things, it’s just the ‘how’ and the ‘where’ that’s
in flux.

Ed P December 16, 2011 at 20:42

I agree with all that.
What’s so idiotic and senseless is the route
local farm produce has to take these days. Without local farmers’ markets,
our veg, etc. travel ridiculous miles to centralised warehouses for
packaging and then distribution to supermarkets, some of which are near
their origin. It’s estimated over 25% of the vitamins are lost from fruit
& veg by these methods and the time it takes.

Some of the major supermarkets accept the insanity of this, but say
it’s (a) impossible to sell local produce due to central company policy
& (b) the customers wouldn’t buy it if “it looks different” to their
usual plastic-wrapped, week old, vitamin-depleted stuff.

Mudplugger
December 16, 2011 at 22:05

Agree completely with (b) – those multi-shaped, mud-encrusted
potatoes my mother sent me to buy as a kid (with a string bag so that
some of the mud dropped out before I got home) were perfectly good and
lasted far longer than the sweated, sterilised, regulated stuff purveyed
by the supermarkets now. I don’t care if a carrot is bent or mis-shapen,
it’s a carrot, not an art-form.

The problem with (a) is just the sheer logistics of volume selling –
too many customers live too far away from the sources of production (or
import) – individual cases may seem nonsensical, but overall it does
deliver ‘value’ to the masses. That’s not to denigrate the role of local
and farmers’ markets (both of which I use frequently) – where
applicable, they’re an excellent minority channel for quality and
variety, but can never replace or compete with the big boys. That’s
progress.

Single Acts of
Tyranny December 15, 2011 at 19:31

Er, aren’t they all, regardless of location, dead as Dillinger in just a
few years anyway?

I’m buying more and more on line and less and ever less in person, be it
out of town, supermarket or town itself.

binao December 15, 2011 at 18:12

It may well be true that supermarkets in the town centre will be less
damaging than out of town. One difficulty is that a supermarket claims to need
around 22,000 sq ft minimum to be efficient for various operational reasons.
Not necessarily welcomed in a village, as http://www.saveourstorrington.org.uk/ shows no matter how
saintly the trader.
On the other hand, renting or owning a small shop gives
no one the right to a living, and if you can’t compete, stop whining and do
something else.

Mudplugger December 15, 2011 at 16:19

There is a long-established retail dynamic going on which is about the
relationship between customers and traders.
Originally, towns and villages
were where a mix of people lived, so shops developed to serve them – the shops
were accessible for the people.
Then, over time, towns and cities grew
bigger, drawing in commerce, not just retailing, meaning offices and
factories. This meant even more people close to the shops, so they still
thrived – they were still accessible.
But then, with improved commuting
transport and a wish to avoid the crush, people moved into suburbs, away from
the nearby shops, so the shops then followed the people – and anyway, land and
buildings were both cheaper and more accessible, especially now that pople had
personal transport. But this removed premium retail trade from the centre,
because the wealthier folk could get what they wanted ouside it, so the centre
was left for the less-wealthy, leading to pound-shops, betting shops, charity
shops etc, the providers to the immobile underclass.
And then along came
the Internet – a device which allowed increasing amounts of that premium
retailing to be done without any visible premises at all, creaming off the
high-margin trade even from those out-of-town retailers.
The story
continues…..
And it will continue, because this is a natural effect of the
various and changing influences on retailing.

Sooner or later it will be realised that town and city centres can no
longer work for retailing, just like they no longer work for commerce and
industry. Perhaps the centres will progressively return to being residential
areas for a mix of population, and the whole cycle may restart. But I doubt
it. The world has moved on, as it does: our challenge is to adapt to where it
takes us and optimise it.

No amount of pratting about with planning rules will change the underlying
dynamic – tilting at windmills would be more effective (especially those
visually-offensive grant-grabbers increasingly littering our land).

M Barnes December 15, 2011 at 15:37

I listened to Mary Portas on the wireless contraption and was pleasantly
surprised. I thought it was going to be a simplistic ‘supermarkets bad; corner
shops good’ thing and she turned out to be refreshingly hardheaded about it
all. Basically she seemed to be suggesting that high st retailers, landlords
and local councils approach their High St as though it was a company – what’s
your strategy, who are you customers, deliver to them. A lone trader (in a
shop or market) cannot compete with the buying power of a large retailer. So
find out what the retailer can’t do and make sure your high st delivers that
very thing.
I shop in supermarkets, but not just supermarkets…. and I
certainly don’t linger in them. So, can I get to the high st easily? Are there
child friendly coffee shops? Is it easy to walk around but drive to and from?
And while I am there, I will ‘top-up’ on the stuff I need to get me through
the next couple of days: milk maybe, a nice loaf, some meat from the butchers…
because that’s easier than going on s specific trip to the supermarket. The
problem is not big retailers – the problem is that councils have mis-managed
their high streets, landlords have gotten greedy over rents and traders have
spent more time moaning about the big boys than looking at what they can
improve on.

I have a less rose-tinted memory of corner shops and high streets from my
youth… I do not mourn dirty shops, over-priced food, local cartels, poor
choice and surly staff. I remember getting sent round to the corner shop with
my mum telling me to check the date code because the owner had a habit of
trying to sell out of date bread and milk. Supermarkets are popular for a
reason and successful high streets are popular for a reason too – and it’s
nothing to do with some sepia tinted mythical golden era. Those ye olde
shoppes-keepers in Ludlow long ago would definitley have spent some time
thinking about how to attract customers in, it’s what shopkeepers live and
breath.

JuliaM December
15, 2011 at 14:42

‘And a goods entrance for our three times a day deliveries, our lorries
can’t get down that street’. ‘Tough’ said English Heritage,’it stays as it
is’.

Well, it’s not like that’s going to cause any pro…

Oh:

Ignoring roadside warning signs, Daniel Gyongyosi turned his 30-ton
lorry into this narrow lane, jack-knifing on the tight corner before
becoming stuck between Grade I-listed buildings.

As Gyongyosi tried to manoeuvre his rig free, one of the lorry’s tyres
exploded causing even more damage.

Ed P December 15, 2011 at 13:59

Ludlow has a suitable open space right in front of the castle where “The
Portas Mall” could be erected. It’s only used for such old fashioned
activities as daily markets, meeting friends and coach party stops.

Perhaps a “Ludlow” act is needed, preventing the despoiling of our
remaining heritage by Mammon?

Antisthenes December 15, 2011 at 13:54

Interesting, quaint, and I believe full of nostalgia even though you deny
it. The answer of course is to reform planning laws and abandon strict
planning rules. Leave planning to the locals who if they wish to follow people
like English Heritage advice and refuse planning then fine but if they prefer
commercial interests advice and allow planning then that is fine also. A one
fits all solution has been one of the many barriers to proper economic
development and increased prosperity and to overriding of local wishes so
ditch it. I know Ludlow well and believe it very lovely place and my instinct
is that left to the locals the place would have retained all it has despite
the opportunity do do otherwise.

Engineer December 15, 2011 at 13:48

Ludlow got it’s Tesco.

Did it kill the high street? Did it heck! The locals bought their toilet
rolls in Tesco, then went to one of the local butchers for their sausages.
Ludlow still thrives….

SadButMadLad
December 16, 2011 at 12:18

We go to our local indoor market for our bacon and eggs and a few other
things. Why? Because they are cheaper, better quality, and the service is
very nice. We do go to Lidl but we don’t enjoy it. Good prices but hate the
service.

Simon Cooke December 15, 2011 at 13:18

Ah progress is such a joy!

In true libertarian fashion should we not privatise town centres?

http://theviewfromcullingworth.blogspot.com/2011/12/privatise-town-centres-thought-on.html

SadButMadLad
December 15, 2011 at 13:08

She should do OK in my small town. One of the main supermarkets is trying
to develop some waste land in the centre of town.

Except that many of the residents are up in arms and want it developed as
something else, even though there is no developer lined up for the alternative
idea. Their reason? They don’t want the town to be just supermarkets (we have
two already) as they claim it would destroy the existing indoor and outdoor
markets.

Saul December 15, 2011 at 12:42

Fork Handles……

Saul December 15, 2011 at 13:13

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz2-ukrd2VQ

Engineer
December 15, 2011 at 13:44

Google “rhbunner.co.uk”.

They’re located in Montgomery (ask Anna – bet she knows it!), and
they’re very much alive and well!

Peter
MacFarlane December 15, 2011 at 15:50

Just what I was thinking myself!

ivan December 15, 2011 at 12:33

Anna, your description reminds me of years ago in my, then, local town.

As a lad of 6 going on 7, I would take the Saturday morning train from the
village to the town with the money and bill carefully tucked in an envelope in
my shirt – my mission to pay dads account at the ironmongers and sometimes to
get a couple of left handed thingamabobs as well.

Paying the bill entailed a walk to the back of the shop to the office where
I would be greeted by the son of the founder, the ladies in the office would
then deal with the paperwork.

Getting the left handed thingamabobs could be fun. If they weren’t stored
in the wall of draws behind the counter, a trip out of the side door and down
the row to another building with winding stairways, odd level floors and small
rooms in which were stored the treasures of the ages – well at least from
about 1870 when the shop was founded. Eventually I would be handed a brown
paper bag that contained the left handed thingamabobs I was after. I usually
ended up leaving the warren by another door that opened into a different
row.

Those were indeed the days and it all went downhill when the council wanted
to ‘modernise’ the town centre and do away with the Friday market.