Some thoughts about dying town centres

[OtterTails]

I have been reading an older thread from 2022 about how many towns across the UK are becoming hollow shells of their former selves. How anti social issues have increased in many of these dying towns, with empty shops and even entire disused precincts.
My own old home town suffered a similar fate - where once there was a mix of social backgrounds and culture, old and young, this has steadily been replaced by troubled souls (addicts/ street drinkers, etc). You never see elderly people there now, and the regular shoppers disappeared after the closure of M&S about 5 years ago. One reason that likely makes this worse is that the local council placed a lot of the troubled singles in the areas around the town centre, which I think has put the last nail in the coffin.

But even though most of us are aware of big stores such as Amazon and online shopping having played a huge pat in this decline, I think there's more to it. Probably a mix of many reasons. We shop differently now, and the wold is changing, etc etc...

And then I thought (not heard this mentioned before), since so many people in the thread said that difficult road systems and parking fees have put them off going into town, maybe our increasing car use has played a big role, too.
There are far many more people on the roads now than ever before, and many older town centres don't have the space or infrastructure to manage this. So in this sense I think that the way we use our cars has altered how we choose to shop, which is quite different to say 20 years ago at the latter end of the high street boom, when many people still used public transport to go to town, even if they owned a vehicle. Or there were simply less people driving, so the roads/carparks weren't as chock full.

Just a thought, it might not just be about business rates or online shopping.

In my old town now, most of the people on the dying high street are at the lowest income bracket, which was absolutely not the case even 10 years ago. I am wondering if this is because they are less likely to own a vehicle - and the only shops that remain cater to this market.
So our larger economy is shaping the decline also.

Most of the pretty, thriving towns I know aren't particularly affluent, but they do have a mix of culture and age ranges, and people coming through often. My old home town doesn't, so the casino's and cheap shops are the only one's left.

OP, I think cars have been affecting these areas for decades. Indoor shopping malls, industrial parks, and big box stores are all catering for cars.

More viable downtowns typically have a good mix of people, with enough money to access shops and services, living in the downtown. SO they ae walking mainly to these places.

The 'town centre' is dying out; I think it will be gone within 20 years at most. The only way of shopping not online in future will be in large retail parks with free parking; and possibly independent, quirky shops will survive in touristy areas.

@TempestTost From your wording - are you in the United States? Just interested to know how widespread this phenomenon is from an international perspective.

Yes, and whilst becoming more 'car dependent' isn't necessarily a good thing (pollution, space taking etc), businesses have made provisions for vehicles in a way that local councils haven't.

People do shop more in tourist areas, simply because they are exploring, and like to purchase memento's and gifts. If I think of somewhere like Ludlow in Shropshire for instance - if you took the day trippers out, I imagine it might be in a pretty similar state. I think tourism masks the problem in some ways, and our booming UK holiday market creates outliers.

I am not in an affluent place myself, but it is thriving due to visitors.

My old town is becoming desperately deprived. No one comes in, and no one seems to go out.

Oh, I also started driving quite late in life (40's) and prior to this I found it very difficult to get to retail parks if transport didn't run close to them. You notice how anti-pedestrian a lot of our localities are when you don't dive - enjoy visiting garden centre's? Forget it!! I imagine the retail park model has been a bind for more elderly people who weren't as vehicle focused as my own generation (gen X).

If you don't drive in my old town, you are stuck with decay and trouble in the more derelict shopping spaces accessible by bus.

My City centre is dying even though there is a large shopping centre with a car park. But there is nothing worth going to except very cheap shops. I agree it is poor people who go to the city centre as they can not get to the retail parks.
I used to go shopping for clothes in stores but stopped when they never ever had my size in stock. They always only had 1 or two sizes and just offered to help you order what you want online. But I wanted to see how it looked on me before ordering the item.

I agree of you are a car user, shopping in retail parks is easy.
The public transport model into town centres is based on the old fashioned idea of people going shopping for a day or afternoon. Retail parks are more based on nipping in for something quick.

Our local town is still thriving. We had a couple of restaurants and some shops close during covid but they have reopened.

But we have a very proactive town council that runs three different markets a week. We have a racecourse, a theatre, annual music and arts festivals. A Victorian park with well maintained & regularly used bandstand and boating lake. A canal with pleasure boats. A market square with pubs and restaurants. Live music. There is always something going on.

Most of the centre is Georgian, and recently many of the spaces above shops have been converted (back) into dwellings. Some of the small Georgian shop buildings have been converted back to high-price town houses. We have a railway station direct into London, so it is possible to live here without a car, and commute. The empty Wilko shop has been bought by a department store. The town has plenty of paid parking, but I visit most weeks and always manage to park for free. I've lived here for 30 years and can buy almost anything I need.

I think the main reason we flourish is we have a mixed economy locally. Agriculture, food manufacture, brewing, horse racing, IT, tourism. A mix of age groups, and housing. Areas of small victorian terraces, larger 1920 &1930s houses, new apartments, outside the town centre there are small estates of housing from 1970s onwards. A healthy & diverse mix.

Absolutely. I think this is key to be honest.
You see large bus stations in the centre's but they're still serving an older, outdated system, we don't really live like that any more.

And it is 'sorting' those who have options from those who don't - and not necessarily about social class either, since the bracket traditionally described as working class have money to spend and are usually 2 car families.

The last time I walked through our old bus station it stank of skunk and urine. I can't get my head around how quickly it went down hill. There seems to be no one who cares, no authority. We wouldn't have dared to smoke or booze in there as teens.

@Meadowfinch Yes, a mixed local economy is essential. What the dying towns have is a stagnant economy. No one is going to invest there. It's so sad.

They keep flogging the same thing with town centres though and society has moved. Whilst in the 90s going clothes shopping for me and my teen sister was a social
occassion - we were in town all day and would go every week. I personally only ever take my kids shopping at the out of towns when they really need something or we mainly do online.

town centres need a different model - affordable housing perhaps , green areas and practical
shops that those residents need to use daily and can walk to ie green grocers, smaller supermarket models, butchers etc. with some more shops like furniture but smaller where they just display items and your order online in the store for delivery. More schools, more doctors surgeries there. Smaller office facilities for local
business. Sustainable communities.

I moan a lot about where I live. Like yours the town centre is dying and full of druggies, beggars, homeless and sadly people who aren’t particularly well off. We also lost our main M and S in April leaving a much smaller one in a large out of town shopping mall.
On the surface the town is a dump but actually there are quite a few well off areas with houses £500k plus, many over a million. We have a thriving private school, even a Porsche garage. Dp is a gardener and most of his clients are old money. He’s just acquired another one who’s a multimillionaire. So your comments resonated with me. What we need to do is attract those types of people back into town - 15 years ago they used to shop there, our town centre was buzzing with local shops - trouble is now we’ve got a huge shopping mall 20 minutes away and we’re similar on the train from a major city. Wealthy folk don’t want to walk through a ghost town where they stand out a mile and I think that’s the issue. The place has declined so much it’s just utterly depressing. We had an area of town that was renovated, filled with nice eateries but 5/6 years later it’s shabby and places have shut down. Anywhere else more desirable I’m sure it would have thrived but because of the homeless issue and general threatening night time atmosphere it’s declining too.

i'm in canada and yes this is a common phenomena here as well.
i'm also a huge fan for urban studies and sociology. i think there's some really interesting concepts, i recently read about the concepts involved in new playground structures.

Parking Charges just don't help.
3 Out of town retail parks and 2 supermarkets with free parking why would you choose to spend 80p to park to go to the butchers, or the pharmacy?

I'll pick food up in the supermarket and I'll use a tiny pharmacy on a street with free parking.

Build loads of out of town, retail parks, office parks, and then wonder why the town centre with parking charges is dead.
And that's before you consider Amazon and every other online shop.

Our city centre is dying off- major retailer's closing due to high rents and the ability to get other premises in cheaper areas. The increase in on line shopping killing off companies- in Scotland, and Fraser's, & debenhams closed. Increase in scam shops- it's all tartan tat shops and international sweet shops left. Tourists still flock there, but fewer local's- although there is a 'luxury' area to the town which is still doing well- juts needs to be a street further down to be the 'town centre'! No parking, the stupid congestion tax and traffic changes all haven't helped

@SD1978 are you talking about Glasgow?

The 3 main roads into Glasgow all have a big retail park, M8 Braehead, Fort & M77 Silverburn so unless you are heading to an office or what you need can only be obtained in John Lewis or some other city centre shop why would you bother?

Ah yes, I can see that now, you have a structure which forces us to become more car dependent, then we are are expected to pay more for the privilege of being trapped in it. I can understand the push to get us to walk, cycle and use public transport more, but no attempts or ideas for how to enable it and make it reliable or safe.

I'm not a fan of cars in general and resisted for decades, but from personal experience you are damned if you do drive and damned if you don't.
As someone who has lived most of my life cycling and walking everywhere, this image illustrates how it looks from the other side, too:

I was thinking similar the other week?
OP are you in the north or south? I think car ownership and online shopping is it really.

As a child I grew up in a large city in the north, end of the line type place and full of deindustrialised, derelict areas and the most deprived areas in The UK interspersed with smaller pockets of wealth. There was an urban population of around 250000. At the heyday day were three huge department stores plus M&S BHS and little wood, two topshop three DP, a thousands of other little stores. Two shopping centres. We'd get the bus to town and have lunch at BHS. It was thriving and we had to queue for a table.

Now it's a shell of its former self. Some of These towns have been revived by mixed land use and increasing tourist footfall but not all.

My local now (not same place I grew up in but not far is an alien place. Full of rehoused people and high levels of ASB, crime and groups of men. There are a few shops I like and think primark holds the town together.

We have a new retail park as the city decentralises with M & S TK MAXX

@thedendrochronologist Yes my old town is Wigan in the north west. I searched MN for threads that featured it out of interest and someone had already been discussing it.

I lived on the outskirts growing up and only started to meet friends there and get to know Wigan town center properly in my early 20's. I left a few years later and am now further south. It is a different world. There were a few people on that thread who came from there, all agreeing that it had declined miserably. Oddly enough it is quite pricey for what it is, housing-wise, and the roads are pure hell.
I last visited there before xmas, the town centre is upsetting. A lot of crime, addiction issues and mental health issues very visible as soon as you enter. There seems to be a kind of lawlessness about it, that is so unfamiliar to me. Time has not been kind to it.

There are some wonderful places in the north west, and I don't believe it is a specific northern issue to be honest, since many of these problems are occurring all across the UK, including Wales, Scotland and Ireland. It is true though that the the areas up there which thrive are largely dependent on tourism. I have a feeling this is not just a northern problem.

The holiday cottage boom seemed to take off like wildfire this past decade. I remember trying to locate one in the early 2000's in the Peak District and it was difficult to locate them unlike now. It has seriously unbalanced communities - a pokey, depressed 1 bed flat in a noisy part of Kendal (Lake District) can cost as much as the same in London. A lot of local renters have been incredibly displaced.

I wonder why there is such a national obsession with this type of 'holiday'? Most of the locations are hectic, not at all relaxing and awfully overpriced.

I live near a town of around 65 000 people in Scotland and only go to the town centre if I can't avoid it for things like eye tests or to visit the main post office.

Firstly it costs £4 to park for more than an hour in the shopping centre car park. I can use on street blue badge spaces for free but there are not many of them and not allowed to drive within certain parts of the town centre between noon and 3pm.

There have always been drug users hanging about since there is a hostel in the town centre. There have recently been videos of people off their face on spice taken and shared on FB pages which was really horrible to see.

There have been numerous reports of a drug addict targeting women with the same sob story about how his wife and girlfriend are at home and he needs money to top up the electricity. A lot of women give him money just to get rid of him. There was a post on FB from a woman, he had got into the lift in the shopping centre with her and put her under pressure in an enclosed space.

A good example here would be Birkenhead. Used to be thriving. Now all of the major shops have closed - M&S, WH Smith, along with its post office, Argos, even Wilko is gone. It's majorly populated by smackheads getting their Methadone prescriptions from the Asda pharmacy and gangs of balaclava clad kids on bikes - you don’t dare make eye contact, they gather in the bus station too so it's best to avoid, especially after dark. Birkenhead park was lost to the same a long time ago. There's social media articles going on about the regeneration of Birkenhead but with the lack of police as things stand, there's no future. No law, no consequences. No one gives a shit.

I don't think my city centre is dying. I go in most days to shop at the supermarket or walk through. I am on foot or the bus though as driving in my city is very unpleasant.

I do think people are wedded to their cars. There are excellent cycle lanes in my town and good cheap buses yet people insist on driving and sitting in traffic for hours.

I wonder if it’s also to do with the way that younger adults spend their money nowadays. When I was a teenager, I would spend a whole day of a weekend clothes shopping with friends in our town centre. It was fun and we always found plenty to buy. I don’t see this happening anymore. I look around at the clothes in the shops there now and can’t think of anything that teens nowadays would want to buy. They would rather buy what their latest favourite influencer is wearing/promoting, which probably can’t be found in your run of the mill high street shops.

Also time- lots more people in high pressured jobs, both parents working and looking after the kids, we have less time than people did years ago to browse the shops. Shopping for me is not a past time anymore as I simply don’t have time, it’s just a means to an end if I need something (not clothes). I will pop in and out of the shops that have what I need and won’t waste time going anywhere else. As for clothes shopping, I personally can’t be bothered to go from shop to shop trying on clothes, that aren’t even that nice (limited choices of styles available in store), when I can search for and order online much quicker and without the faff of dragging my kids round with me as well.

Another perspective:

I actually prefer shopping for certain things instore, but actually the main reason I now rarely venture into my local town centre is that I have 3 year old and there is absolutely bugger all there for small children.

I know some bigger city centres have free soft play in shoppimg centres, maybe some play cafes, bowling, and some put on extra things like rides/fake beaches in school holidays. I live in a big town and it has sweet FA. So I’m elsewhere at the weekends.

@Outthedoor24 - Edinburgh. Used to really enjoy a trip into town years ago, and the post is specifically asking if your town centre is dead- Edinburgh's definitely is. Usually head to Livingston for a wander now, or to Glasgow Fort. No point going to the city for anything now- although the 'golden turd' is alright. But a pain to get to (St James centre)