The Second Life of the High Street
Retail left and the buildings stayed. What has moved into them is stranger, more local and considerably harder to measure than what it replaced.
The vacancy statistics say one thing and the street says another. On this stretch the official figure is nineteen per cent, which sounds like the beginning of the end. Walking it, the impression is of a street that is busy at the wrong times of day and in the wrong ways for anyone counting footfall against till receipts.
Three units are occupied by businesses that do not sell anything to the public at all. One is a physiotherapy practice. One assembles and repairs bicycles for a distributor two counties away. One is, as far as anybody can determine, a very small architectural practice that keeps the blinds down. None of them appear in retail data. All of them pay rent.
The shopfront as cheap floorspace
What is happening is a re-pricing. For seventy years a ground-floor unit on a main street commanded a premium because passing trade was valuable. Once passing trade stopped being the main channel, that premium had no basis, and rents fell to a level at which the space became interesting to occupiers who had never previously been able to afford a street frontage and did not particularly want one.
I am not on the high street because it is the high street. I am here because it is nine pounds a square foot and the door is wide enough to get a bike frame through.
This is a less romantic story than the one usually told about independent revival, and a considerably more robust one. These occupiers are not there out of loyalty to the neighbourhood and will leave if a better unit appears elsewhere. But they are also not competing with online retail, which means the force that emptied the street does not threaten them.
The measurement problem
- Occupancy is recovering on streets where retail spend continues to fall — the two indicators have decoupled.
- Planning use classes were written for a division between retail, office and industrial that these occupiers ignore.
- Business improvement districts funded by retail levies are increasingly serving occupiers who generate none.
Local authorities are, on the whole, responding to the street they have data for rather than the street that exists. Several are still pursuing footfall strategies for stretches where the majority of new occupiers would prefer fewer people walking past their window, not more.
Whether any of this constitutes recovery depends on what the high street was for. If it was a place to shop, it is not recovering. If it was a place where small enterprises could afford a door onto the street, it is doing better than it has in forty years.
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