Why the future of high streets lies in the past

COMMENT I’ve always believed that if you want to know a city you should look at its streets. It’s not about the grand monuments, galleries and museums. These are structures built to impress outsiders. For those who live within a city, it’s the small shops, scattered across each street and corner. These are the true windows into an area’s soul. The humble corner shop, family-run restaurant, creative emporium. These give us an idea of what a place truly is. Who serves, is served, what is served, shows how a city actually serves for the people who live there. Shops have the power not only bring to us together but to create a sense of community. In a world obsessed with screens, it’s refreshing to walk into a warmly lit shop, where the server knows your order, your name, without an algorithm. And yet look at the news – the headlines, the bulletins and the story portrayed is that our streets are in decline; “the high street is dying”. It’s clear that the government doesn’t believe in the power of our streets either. To them, it seems renewal is a pipe dream. Write a different story I believe we can change this narrative. But it won’t be through our local councils spending taxpayers’ money, or through government legislation. This is obvious when looking at the recent government scheme to give schools a free portrait of King Charles III, a scheme which cost £8m. Across the entirety of the UK, £7m has been allocated to give to councils and community bodies to support their high streets. And we are meant to be a nation of shopkeepers. To create change, we need to look to the past. Look back to Ancient Greece, to the marketplaces – the “agoras”, which literally translates as “gathering place”. Filled with changing diverse trade that adhered to its communities’ needs, their blueprint is one we should echo. Put that in comparison to Oxford Street. Shops are given away for free, and the same big stores sell the same big products that you can buy anywhere in the world. It lacks vision of its own future. There is no one questioning what it stands for, or asking why does it deserve to exist? It’s a glorified runway of monotonous consumerism. This monotony is bad for our mental health. In architect Thomas Heatherwick’s new book, Humanise, he cites medical studies which show we need variation in our cities to stimulate our mental and physical wellbeing and happiness. This need was never clearer than during the first year of the pandemic. I would make the 20-minute pilgrimage to Hackney’s Broadway Market to buy the same essential goods each week. It was filled with hundreds of people. Why? Because it was a place to gather. A beautiful, haphazard place to sit and have a coffee, people-watch and read – a place where everything felt like it had just fallen into place. I am sure the street is no different to when my dad was a kid. It still looks the same, sells the same produce, and I have no doubt it will remain so when my kids one day visit. Keep it local When we embarked on our Deptford Market Yard project, it was a street of 20 shops, restaurants and studios that had arguably lost its way. Before we began work on this little street, we asked ourselves the very question Oxford Street seems to forget. Why should this street deserve to exist? For us, the answer was simple. It had to be unapologetically local. Each and every entrepreneur had to be local to the area or be connected to it, and each shop had to have its own story. So, we stripped back. We took out the metal signs and wayfinders more suited to a mall than to a street, we added in seating structures to create a pathway where people could watch passers-by or be seen, we asked local schoolchildren to draw flags that now line the street, and local painters hand-painted each sign. When choosing business owners and shopkeepers to fill each space, we considered each decision. We tried the food, the coffee and the wine. We listened to each story. Serve the people The key to all of this was not to create a place that everyone might like. We are not trying to create another generic Hilton hotel. We wanted to create a place where you could fall in love with the small stuff, switch off, disconnect and find a place to call yours. And in the past 18 months we have seen a ripple effect. There has been an 816% increase in interest in Deptford on Appear Here’s platform, and not just to be on our street but to fill shops in the surrounding area. This project ultimately is an experiment. We have seen what works, what people connected with, and we can use those learnings to create more streets across the UK. Streets to reflect each individual area, to answer its needs. I believe that real estate is too confined by the rules. It is too fearful of its mistakes. What we need is a return to the past. To streets that actually serve our cities and serve our people. Ross Bailey is chief executive and founder of Appear Here