Ideas@TheCentre
Heart is where the shops are
Last Christmas, I ordered a turkey from the local butcher, but he went bust a few months ago. This year, I shall get the car out and buy a bird from an out-of-town supermarket. It will be a less enjoyable experience but a lot cheaper. The butcher’s shop is still boarded up.
For Christmas my grandson wants Star Wars Lego. My local toyshop had a small selection, each priced at £25.99. Back home, I went online to find Amazon had the full range for just £20.99 each, with free delivery. I bought an Ewok Attack, and it arrived the next day.
Town centre shops have been losing trade to the supermarkets and suburban malls for many years, but now, small retailers are being further, often fatally, squeezed by the double whammy of the economic downturn and the growth of Internet retailing. Less than 50% of all retail sales in Britain now occur in town centres. Bookshops, grocery stores, and electrical retailers are giving way to second-hand charity shops that pay no rent. Nationally, one in seven UK shops is now vacant, and in the most depressed parts of the country, the figure exceeds one in three.
Last week, the Cameron government published a report on the future of town centre retailing. Recognising that we shall never return to the 1950s townscape of the butcher, the greengrocer, and the fishmonger, the report nevertheless made 28 recommendations for resuscitating the High Street. Some – like easing trading regulations – made sense. Others – like business rates concessions and reduced parking charges – seem unaffordable at a time of local council budget stringency. There are whimsical proposals for attracting more market traders and health spas to town centres, and there is a touching faith in the wisdom of planners to come up with coherent renewal strategies. The truth, however, is that little can be done to turn the tide.
Does it matter if towns and cities are being hollowed out and left to rot? Economically, perhaps not. Supermarkets, suburban malls, and the Internet can supply almost everything we need at highly competitive prices, so why worry?
But there is a social, political and cultural dimension that should concern us. Historically, towns and cities evolved as autonomous centres of commercial activity bringing together merchants and independent professionals who challenged the traditional power of kings and popes. The great liberal sociologist, Max Weber, defined the city as a marketplace, and he showed how all our modern ideas of civil society – autonomous law, free association, individual property rights, democratic authority – arose out of this commercial nexus. Medieval urbanism was the birthplace of modern capitalism. As the old adage had it, city air makes men free.
It still does. Cities and towns are places where individuals come together, not just to buy Lego or turkeys (although this commercial activity is crucial to sustaining everything else) but also to drink coffee, listen to music, watch films, hold demonstrations ... The retreat to the suburbs, and now, via the Internet, to our own lounge rooms, represents an erosion of the bourgeois life, a disintegration of civil society. The market still functions, but it has no location. This leaves centralised authority confronting a fragmented, anonymised, privatised populace.
There may be little we can do to stop or reverse this trend. But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be disturbed by it. Happy Christmas.
Peter Saunders is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
