Let's Hear it for the High Street Fightback
Evening Standard
I do not live to shop. I am a non-driving single parent who often works 18-hour days and weekends. Shopping is a chore. So a part of me welcomes glittering new shopping malls like the one planned for White City, details of which we saw this week. I appreciate their convenience. But I also know that the rise of shopping malls and chains such as Starbucks are conspiring to destroy the British high street. Hackney, where I live, is a good example. It's full of what were once bustling shopping parades, now reduced to shabby groups of betting shops, establishments selling dubious fried chicken and newsagents offering porn magazines and lottery tickets.
When I was a child, every little parade of shops boasted a butcher, baker and greengrocer. My mother walked to the shops every day. The current decline of local shopping is bad news for the elderly, young mothers with buggies and indeed anybody without a car.
And yet from what I see in Hackney, communities are fighting back. And the principal force revitalising its local shops, now newly unfashionable, is multiculturalism. Everybody knows how Asians saved the British corner shop. But in Hackney, Turkish and Kurdish shopkeepers, with their careful displays of flowers and fresh fruit, have improved the look of many streets. An intrepid Vietnamese community has revitalised part of Mare Street by opening a whole series of restaurants.
Meanwhile, Stoke Newington Church Street gets posher every week. For the other inner-city tribe that has driven regeneration is the fearless white, middle-class gentrifier. They are the main customers for the farmers' markets and other new street markets which are helping to reinvigorate local shopping. So in Hackney, the Broadway Market has completely transformed a run-down street. By contrast, officially sponsored regeneration has a patchy record. The most important things government can do are the basics: decent street cleaning and refuse collection, crime prevention, parking. But councils need to take a tougher line to preserve the ecology of local shopping areas, much as the de Walden estate has in Marylebone. They could work through the planning laws, and where they are major landlords, deal with problems such as rents being pushed up. Stoke Newington Church Street has suffered a classic version of the problem: innovative small shopkeepers regenerated a street and made it popular, only to have greedy freeholders push up rents.
That way we might end up with a healthier, more interesting mix of shops in places like Hackney. Still, don't expect to see me shopping 'til I drop.
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