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a similar fate - where once there was a mix of social backgrounds and culture, old and young, this has steadily been replaced by troubled souls (addicts/ street drinkers, etc).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.

Yes, and it isn't cheap to live in Wigan, industrial decline or no. Not unless you are in a deprived postcode. Even then, it baffles me how costly it is to live there. New build detached homes can go for around 5-700K only streets from the deprivation.

There are some beautiful places that have excellent shops and transport links with similar rents/house prices to Wigan. I live in one now! I just can not see the attraction.

I think Bury is doing better because I guess it’s closer to Manchester although not by much and historically wasn’t a ‘mill town’. It also has the metrolink tram which Bolton stupidly refused because it thought shoppers would disappear to Manchester ! Ironically the one thing that might help Bolton is the fact that Manchester is becoming increasingly expensive and house prices/rents are reasonable (saying that apparently Bolton has the some of the fasting rising rents in the UK)….
We had a particularly poor and complacent council for many years but austerity also hit hard too. Sadly a lethal combination.
Preston is a city I think which may have influenced its recovery and I do know that it has tried hard to encourage local home grown businesses.

@OtterTails yep, some of these places are not cheap - it's a fallacy

To give you an idea here is a modernish house in Bath and one in Chippenham - both at the lower end of that spectrum - not grim ones either - and both are a lot nicer than Wigan sounds

www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/86815524#/?channel=RES_NEW

www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/143311553#/?channel=RES_BUY

Thanks, that is interesting.
I did comparisons a while ago all around the UK and couldn't understand it at all.

There are some really, really deprived areas with high crime in Wigan (Scholes and Ince) and an average, unmodernised (and not in a good way!) grim terrace in a noisy street beside warehouses can ask for over £800pcm. Sales are usually more reasonable at around 120K, but you couldn't pay me to live there!

A lot of these crumbling terraces, often with gas boilers lopsidedly hanging off a bedroom wall are made in to HMO's. Most of them obviously defying safety concerns, not to mention overspilling trash - and the creatures it attracts.

There are decent areas in Wigan, quite lovely. But the areas surrounding the centre are grim. And expensive!

@QueenofClutter - I think I know which town you're talking about - I live there. The M & S you mention - did it used to be in the town centre? And did Wilko close recently? It's so sad. It's a shadow of its former self.

@OtterTails thing with Wigan Bolton etc are the good motorway links. Can be on the outskirts of Liverpool within 40 mins at a push, close to M60, Salford, Manchester, less than an hour to Huddersfield, Leeds. Lakes in under an hour. If you live on the outskirts you’ve got good access to major cities/towns.

This is a thing in many cities here in Canada and the US too, now.

It's funny, because thinking back there was a real sweet spot in my city, and also in a lot of others, where there was a ton of inner city regeneration. This had some problems, especially for those on low incomes, but also a lot of benefits.

But the problem does seem to have been that all of a sudden, there were so many extra people that housing couldn't keep up, and a lot of people with incredibly severe drug issues, on a scale we'd never seen here before.

I've been told by the people who work with this group that the problem started like this on the west coast about 10 years ago, and over that 10 years has moved east, as meth became cheap and available, and also fentanyl. And the dominant "solution" among the addictions people for this seems to be giving out needles, safe injection sites, and the newest push is "safe supply" which is to say giving out the drugs.

It doesn't seem to have done any good on the west coast, but maybe we just have to wait longer - I won't hold my breath though.

It also has the metrolink tram which Bolton stupidly refused because it thought shoppers would disappear to Manchester !

I heard about this, and thought it was one of the maddest things ever. Shops and services around tram stops usually do well because people pick things up before and after taking the tram. But a lot of UK small towns are just really, really averse to building anything (and then complain about being "left behind"....)

By the way: just going back to Tom Forth who I mentioned earlier, but most of his work is on the North of England and especially places like Bolton, Wigan and the like.

Here's the thing: everyone thinks that "Manchester's booming! Poor old Bolton and places like it are left-behind and poor - just look at the state of their high streets. It's so unfair!"

Meanwhile, the actual data shows income to be higher in Bolton and similar areas, believe it or not, than in Manchester itself (not because Bolton is doing marvellously - it isn't - but because Manchester actually has even more poverty, in spite of its sparkly towers and other symbols of development). We see the same patterns around Birmingham, Leeds and the like.

As Forth put it (I'm quoting him directly), "You'll get people in, say, suburban Bolton pissed off that "Manchester's high street is booming and ours isn't". Incomes are higher in Bolton, but the money goes on running a car and shopping with it."

Reading many of these messages I can't help wondering if a lot of the disappointment with the current 'high street' is basically remorse for peoples' teenager years when they used to meet friends and go 'shopping' for the day?

This was before social media, on-line shopping, music streaming etc. Teenager's lives are different in many ways than the 70s-90s. Even the idea of letting your 14 year old go into to town to meet her friends is frowned upon, add in the increase in car ownership (many women actually have their own now!), is it any wonder that the high street is dying?

Surprised incomes are higher. People in towns are often older and more asset wealthy, more disposable income. Whereas in Manchester you're paying a fortune in rent, particularly around the centre.

Younger people tend to leave towns at 18 for Uni and then don't return, so they lose their buzz.

I was surprised too, but there you go.

The UK is a very odd place in many ways. In most countries, big cities tend to create lots of wealth, while small towns and the countryside tend to be hours away from anywhere and are genuinely quite remote and have a lot of poverty as a result. We see this particularly in big spread-out countries like the United States, but it's also true in other European countries like France and Spain, where small-town/rural poverty are very noticeable.

The UK is different. London is of course wealthy, but most of our other cities are poor and generate little wealth - Birmingham has just gone bankrupt, even sparkly-looking Manchester relies on fiscal handouts from London to provide services at a tolerable level. And income level generally gets higher as you move out from the city. Look at all those little bluey-green (=wealthy) villages on the map. Because settlement are mostly quite close together in the UK, most British villages tend to be places you can commute to, so they do to an extent serve as "pretty places to park a family/retire if you have enough money." Absolutely nobody in the US would take their family to live in a small town and try to commute to the nearest city as you'd be driving about six hours and American small towns are basically depressing dumps.

Stuff like this is why I get a bit irritated with the way that the "levelling up" stuff keeps getting obsessed with "small towns" at the expense of the big cities, which is where we should be focusing our attention - most poor people live there, and it's big cities that have the potential to become wealth-generators for their regions. We need to look after Leeds, Manc, Brum etc. first and foremost!

@user1471538283 I get what you are saying but if you live actually in Manchester as opposed to greater Manchester I think you can definitely take advantage of a superior jobs market. In the smaller towns surrounding Manchester transport connections in to the city and beyond are appalling and expensive, trains are cancelled willy nilly, the bus journey is long and not all the satellite towns have a tram link. Try getting from Bolton to Stockport if you cannot drive, it’s impossible. Many jobs in my town are NMW, the more affluent folk either WFH or commute out of town. I think Manchester, Leeds and Brum have had loads of investment. I’m not sure the answer is even more ! These aren’t tiny towns we’re talking about either. The town I live in has >300,000 people.

People don’t browse or go shopping as a hobby anymore.

Actually I think this is why tourist place thrive because it is still done - we do it - but not as common as it once was and it's often part of the day out.

Even nearby town with cinema - will often go early and look round shops. Once we start paying for transport we do want to do as much as possible on trip.

My 14 hangs out in parks to meet friends - the one midway into town is popular and then do sometimes walk in and look round - the lack of browsing shops stops them doing it more. I think it partly their youth and lack of cash that means they bother at all with local city center ( more like a town).

I think the center here passed the critical point and all the money spent is now just a waste - fewer shops and more flats - commutable with trains and buses to several bigger cities is probably set in stone now.

@user1477391263

"Most" people don't live in the big cities. The majority live in smaller cities, towns and rural areas.

London is only "wealthy" on paper because it's sucked in all the jobs and head offices. Tesco's profits from, say, it's Grimsby store aren't shown in the Grimsby economy because they're shown in their head office area, as is all the head office administrative, operational, marketing, etc staff. If they moved their head office to Grimsby, suddenly it would make the Grimsby statistics look good, even if most of the staff were still working from home in and around London!

Same with all the banks, insurance firms, etc., who used to have regional offices, town centre offices, some even had head offices in small cities and towns. All now concentrated in London.

People are buying stuff outside the cities, being employed outside the cities, but because their companies are located in cities, it distorts the statistics!

Even the idea of letting your 14 year old go into to town to meet her friends is frowned upon
Really? My 14 year olds do this regularly.

Any parent that frowns on 14 year old GCSE age teenager going out to the high street is just controlling lol

@Ifailed No I think public spaces matter. And public spaces in most cities and towns are awful. That includes town centres and other spaces.

Some really fascinating contributions here, thanks to everyone who has shared their thoughts. Lots that I wasn't aware of, and it has given me a new perspective on many issues in the UK.

We are on a break in Bowness (lake District) at the moment, so interesting to compare to my current town, Shrewsbury, and to other places I have lived. There is a sense of something unrestful here beneath the tourism and lovely views. Builders everywhere, people paying over £1000 per week to live beneath scaffolding and constructions. We are lucky as it is further down the road from us, but many streets are chock full of it. According to people we have spoken to this goes on all year round now - a sign of prosperity on the one hand and calamity on the other. And the prices to stay here go up, year after year, but do people's wages, on the whole?

Windermere, the smaller town, has a Co Op, a Sainsbury's and a Booths. Without the tourism I am certain most of these provisions would collapse. There are two post offices within a short distance here, so all things considered, a tiny tourist area has more provisions than a huge town like Wigan. It seems everything is being starved unless it's a honey pot visitors attraction.

I would say that here in the UK, profit is valued over people to an unhealthy and unsustainable extent. The wellbeing of communities is way down the list.

I love this picture, it shows it so well.

And yet drivers still think pavements are for them to park on

It's frowned upon to let your 14yo meet their friends in the town centre? Where is this and why?

Certainly, not frowned upon here. As I said my 11yo loves going shopping with her friends.

My 13 year old goes to the two nearest cities (both about 45 mins on the bus), but not into the town on a weekend which is a 15 min walk.

He does walk through the town with friends going to school on a morning. It’s fairly quiet then but weekends are pretty bad.

Main reasons are that it’s crap. There’s no shops that have things he would want to look at or buy. But also, because there’s quite a lot of drunks about all weekend long. And there has been quite bad problems with groups of youths. Physical attacks, riding motorised scooters the wrong way on the roads, trashing shops, shoplifting etc. I wouldn’t want him in town. School holidays are pretty horrendous.

Ds is autistic. Getting involved in any of that would likely end with him barely leaving the house. His friends are all quite quiet and prefer to go to the cities where there’s not as much of this.

I go into town on a Saturday morning if I am getting my nails done and it’s not great. Sick on pavements, some drunks still hanging around trying to get change for a bus etc.

@OtterTails we go to Skipton a lot and it has a better shopping centre than our town of > 300k people. Shops like we could only dream of. Difference is we don’t have many tourists, not deliberately anyway.

Skipton doesn't have retail parks and out of town supermarkets etc., so people "have to" go there to do their shopping. It helps that the Morrisons is next to the train station and close enough to walk into the main shopping street. Also helps that parking is ridiculously cheap so the council aren't actively pursuing a war on motorists. It shows what things can be like without retail parks and stupidly expensive parking!

@taxguru we are the same in Bath (although we don't have cheap parking- quite the opposite ) - we don't have retail parks , and several of the big supermarkets (Waitrose, Sainsbury's, M&S ) are in the centre -