Austerity engulfs the High Street
I grew up in Retford. Many of you may have passed through it on the train to somewhere else. It was rather cruelly once described by a journalist as the sort of place where an imaginatively arranged assortment of cotton reels in a shop window would draw a crowd.
It did however have a vibrant market, a sense of civic pride in it’s Town Hall and Grammar School, and a cannon captured during the Crimean war, a mainline railway station and a cottage hospital. It was what planners may have described as a large rural service centre. It also had an inordinate number of pubs, enough in the
town centre for you to try a different one every week. Explains a lot!
I passed through the other day to find the White Hart, it’s iconic
former coaching hotel closed, the site of five of it’s former employers closed and a level of retail devastation on the High Street which was eye watering. The site of the old Grammar is mothballed with a”to let” sign and the whole place seems now an ideal centre for tumble
weed breeding. I offer you this nostalgia and sadness in view of the following extract from an article in Guardian which says:
“As the government’s austerity measures take hold, experts warned that the number of retailers going bust would continue to rise this year with a number of household names facing insolvency.
The confectioner Thorntons emerged as the latest high street casualty when it said on Tuesday it would close up to 180 stores, putting more than 1,000 jobs at risk. The flooring chain Carpetright followed suit, saying 50 stores could close as consumers shun purchases amid fuel and food price inflation and rising job insecurity, especially in the public sector.”
All of this makes me think really hard about the need for a new and radical approach to what the future of our market towns should be. It needs to be held on a bigger and more interesting scale than anyone currently is achieving. Take Retford as a microcosm. Local retail loyalty schemes aren’t going to revive a Town Centre which has lost it retail rationale in terms of both the savage impacts of the economic downturn but also a consequence of the unravelling of long term trend around online and out of town retailing. There is no prospect of it’s manufacturing employers reopening. It is increasingly becoming a commuter island marooned 15 miles off shore from Doncaster, 20 from Sheffield and almost 30 from Nottingham.
District Councils and Charities only have resoures to be ameliorative in their impact. What should we do to get ahead of the economic curve in terms of the life draining problems facing many rural towns like this? Or should we just give up an choose to live instead (those who can afford it) in affluent isolation in rural villages or decamp to the big City?