So, we have a problem: shops are closing down at record rates during the pandemic. When we can return to our high streets, more shops than ever before will be boarded up. This seems to be very bad for employment, our economy, and what passes for community in Britain’s 21st Century towns and cities.
But there is an opportunity here. Instead of letting these shops stay boarded up, and instead of letting yet another supermarket branch or Starbucks show up, let’s do something good with them, something that builds community and completely changes the way future generations understand their towns.
Hubs of experience
I think our town centres should be hubs of experience. When you take your family to the town centre, it would be good if you can get a new pair of trousers and a book, but how about you were also able to take them to do something fun?
Our town centres could offer activities that tackle many of the challenges facing our country: you could try out new sports and make our nation more active; you could try the arts and enter an industry that took a big hit from the pandemic; or you could take part in a crafts session and spend time working with and talking to the people from your town.
Who said our town centres have to be filled up with more shops? Let’s fill them with skateparks, mini-theatres, five-a-side pitches, crazy golf, painting workshops, phone-based photography lessons, nature watching groups, cooking classes. This could have all manner of positive side effects:
Economically
Because of the pandemic, more people than ever before have moved online to do their shopping. Many High Street jobs will have disappeared by the time we are allowed to visit them again in earnest and many people will continue to shop online, thereby exasperating the problem. What the internet cannot offer us, however, is real life experience. If footfall is drawn to town centres by the promise of attractions and experience, then we will need staff to operate these new attractions (attractions that may well be paid for, or ‘pay as you feel is appropriate’) and so we can offer jobs to people who have seen their’s go with the fall of Debenhams or Arcadia etc.
As well as generating employment for people who are now out of work thanks to businesses closing down during the pandemic, these experiences will bring footfall to areas where businesses are still looking to make a profit, thereby giving them a fighting chance of competing with internet giants.
Community
These new experience-based attractions are much more likely to foster a sense of community than browsing Topshop ever did. Organisations like Near Neighbours have shown that shared experiences within diverse communities lead to reduced tensions. When I sit and paint next to my neighbour, when I have a kick about with them, or act with them on an amateur stage, I am brought closer to them and it is harder to ‘other’ them. We can cut through identity politics by seeing the human being, instead of what we might perceive of them because of their identity.
This approach could even lead to greater security for our communities, as extremism and crime thrive when people are isolated and it is easier to demonise other people. If we give people a sense of belonging in our town centres, we make them less vulnerable to the pernicious influence of people who would seek to radicalise them.
Lastly, these could be community-owned activities. Communities could be given the chance to choose which activities suit them and they could be set up as cooperatives, run by the community and not by a distant mega-corporation.
Health
The pandemic has had a devastating effect on the physical and mental health of our nation. These experience-based attractions would help to tackle that. By making sport more readily available in town centres, we will get people moving. If it was possible to skate, or have a mini game of (walking or running) football in town, we would encourage people to join in who might not have been motivated to go out and search for their nearest football team or skate park. This kind of sporting activity should be set up for both kids and adults and should seek to bring in groups who are often isolated from opportunities for sport.
Elsewhere, opportunities to engage with art, culture, and nature would undoubtedly have a profound impact on mental health, as would the community-based aspect. Isolation can be more detrimental to health than smoking. As for the people who would work at these attractions, it would certainly be more gratifying to work in a place where fun is the defining ethos, rather than to work in a place where profit is the defining ethos.
The long term impact
If we were to reimagine our town centres like this over the coming years, in the decades to come we would have children who grow up with an entirely different understanding of their town. It would be paradigm shifting. They would see their neighbours as friends, not as strangers, they would see sports, art, and nature as accessible to them, they would see their town centres as places of fun and not somewhere you go when you want to buy things to fill the void in your life that’s been created by consumerism and loneliness.
This approach would also vastly improve the skills base in our country. We would have more actors, comedians, painters, singers, sportspeople, and nature experts. We would empower future generations with these skills, but we’d also need to train existing working-age adults so they could facilitate these experiences.
Doing away with throw-away consumer culture would also have a hugely beneficial long term impact on our environment.
To close…
The moments that define our lives aren’t about when we bought that new pair of shoes, they are memories of what we did and who we did it with. Let’s make those memories possible.
609-11