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a similar fate - where once there was a mix of social backgrounds and culture, old and young, this has steadily been replaced by troubled souls (addicts/ street drinkers, etc).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

I loved the "bloody" Christmas Market @Crikeyalmighty . I went to it last year. It was brilliant (I avoided a weekend day)

Yes, but its cities have developed in this spaced-out, sprawling manner essentially because of the cars!

If you look at what American cities were like before cars were normalized, they looked no different to European cities of the time, with walkable dense neighborhoods and streetcars (trams).

The geographical size of the US does mean that you get bigger gaps between cities, but that really isn’t anything to do with how sprawling-v-dense the city is once you get to it.

Personally, I don't admire or desire homogenous 'affluence' - this doesn't particularly make a community, and there are many schools of thought that suggest a mixed cultural experience is healthier all round.

Affluence in itself can be suffocating and less diverse. In some odd way I see us becoming less and less interested in diversity as a culture, think of the 80's with so many economic backgrounds producing music, art and ideas.

A perfect cotswold-esque village could be a haven or a suffocation. It depends how we look at it.

I think it is the lack of integration between cultures and class that is the problem.

We’ve had a lot of discussion on here about how building more dense housing within town centers could both revive town centers and deal with the housing crisis, and it’s so true - the UK needs to be working flat-out on this area. Leeds and Manchester have been taking strides in terms of building more housing in the center - let’s hope Birmingham ups its game a bit more.

However, people need to be aware that any sort of serious shift in the direction of “let’s make our cities more like Japanese or (many) Continental cities, with loads more people living in the center in flats and townhouses” will demand shifts in the UK way of life that will be painful.

If you’re going to build all this housing in the center of town, 80% of the brownfield sites you develop in this way will probably be car-parking space. Politicians are wary of saying this out loud to voters because they know the way motorists will react, but it’s the truth. So, car parking spaces “in town” will start to disappear.

If all the new city-center residents buy cars, the roads (and roadsides and pavements) will be clogged, so cities will have to start tightening up on parking rules and stopping the new residents from owning them.

And if city centers start to fill up with lots of people who don’t use cars, these residents will start to put pressure on their political representatives to start pushing cars out of the city more and more and doing things that make life harder and harder, as they will want us polluted neighborhoods to live in and safety for riding bikes etc. More and more road space in urban areas will have to be set aside for cycle lanes and bus lanes.

To make up for this, the UK will need to get serious about developing proper public transport into the center, ideally trams and trains rather than buses, which will be financially easier once you have more people livingin the center, but which, realistically, will be funded by charging drivers more in the form of congestion charges, road tolls and the like.

Long term, it’s a far better way of running a city, and the UK will be a lot better off (financially and in terms of QOL). In the meantime, it will be a painful transition and voters will hate it. British drivers go nuts when you try to remove any parking spaces from them, or if you stop subsidizing their driving and make them pay for the roads they use….

(We can have great and affordable public transport in Japan in part because drivers have to pay very expensive tax, very expensive road tolls and very expensive parking, which both generates loads of money and manages demand. As one urbanist put it “Good public transport is the chocolate cake that voters get once they have eaten their veggies and accepted restrictions on cars and paying for the cost of driving.”).

@user1477391263 on the subject of filling town centres with affordable homes.....

My old home town spent it's levelling up money on reviving/repurchasing a historical property that had been languishing in private hands. The other half of the money went to a local thug who refurbishes nightclubs on a notoriously violent sreet.
It is difficult to parse this in light of gov agreement.

They have plans now to decorate the town centre with a host of single person flats and 'luxury properties' - but we have been there before, in the 90's, and it never, ever works in Wigan. They quickly become troubled rentals and anyone working moves out.

Wigan town centre is teeming with crime, male violence and addicts/beggars. I wonder what the logic is that people with money will choose to live in the thick of this. It seems ridiculous. The council don't seem to be able to help these people, and the areas around the town are fast turning into neglected slums. I have no idea who is going to purchase or rent these newly planned apartments
There's no work in the area.

@user1471538283 We have some housing in our city without parking that has recently been built. It is pretty hard to let. Student accommodation works in cities without car parking, but most other people are not interested.

Your reasoning is very shallow. Owning a car is already extremely expensive - not just the cost of buying one but insurance, service charges, etc. Many people do so because they simply have no choice! Try to apply a bit of brain, you sound like our politicians who don't understand why we insist on the polluting metal boxes.

In London, with very good public transport less than half of all households own cars
https://centreforlondon.org/blog/car-ownership-census/.

The rest of the country however is much worse off. I moved from London to Manchester. A journey that would've taken me 30 minutes max in London takes 1.5 hours here! Because public transport is like the spokes of a wheel, easy to get into the centre but difficult to go in between. In London it's a densely connected web.

And of course...1.5 hours if the train or bus is on time! Delays, cancellations, which have a huge knock on effect because of low service frequencies. If one bus is even 10 mins late I miss the next one, which only comes every 30 mins, so I then have to wait another 30 mins... multiply with lots of connections and you can see it snowballs into a 2 hour delay. I've also been left stranded in pissing rain, in the cold and dark, waiting for a bus that never arrived. Or at least maybe it did, idk, I usually wait an hour+ then cave and get an Uber.

So, of course people 'go nuts' when they're penalised for driving. The sensible way would be to provide the public transport FIRST. Or at least, make the existing services reliable, before you go around penalising drivers.

It's ironic that you're talking about this on a thread r.e high streets. If people can't go anywhere they'll just sit at home. And surely that's what the thread is bemoaning?

Nowhere else is going to have public transport like London. Elsewhere public transport has been cut in recent years.

@kitsuneghost - my trip will now be a total of 10 miles, so not walkable due to a) distance and b) my journey would take me most of the way and back on an A road with no pavements.

Very patchy bus service too.

They really force you into driving…

Can you tell me where the housing FB in Leeds city centre is affordable for most people? Especially families? The only people I know who have moved into Leeds centre have been very wealthy. And often just rent renting one flat apartments for during the week as they actually live in London.

In all honesty if I could move into Leeds into a place big enough for me and my 2 kids. And give up my car, I would in a heart beat.

Unfortunately, I would still struggle to get to work. Because of the transport network. But we are thinking of opening an office in Leeds. It would be perfect for me.

The reason a lot of people go nuts is that they need a car. Not choose to. So making it crippling expensive is really damaging to people. Where I currently live, you need a car. Those that don’t are the ones that don’t work. Mainly older people. And they tend to be the ones that don’t really leave the area on a day to day basis. If you have a job, you would be adding hours on your day.

My 3 bed mid terrace is worth £130k. How many people looking in that bracket for a 3 bed home could afford to just move to Leeds City centre?

Honestly, if I could afford it without a huge drop in lifestyle I would. It would make life easier for dd at uni. She wants to work at a Firm in Leeds when she leaves.

But quite a few of the schools in travelling distance from the city am centre aren’t great either. So I would wait until ds has finished his GCSE’s as he goes to a good school.

I earn good money and it would be a huge stress on financials for me.

Basically, the way it works is:

If you build lots of housing in the center of town, you create lots of people who live in the center of town and use public transport lots (and therefore putting lots of fare monies into the system), because they are not owning cars or are only owning one car and using it relatively little.

These sections of the public transport system are therefore profitable.

It therefore is possible for good public transportation services to run into the suburbs, because the profit-making parts in the city centers are, in effect, "subsidizing" the suburban sections (which will always be loss-making due to lower population densities).

The UK doesn't need everyone to go live in the center of town. It needs enough people to live in the center of town for the purposes of a) actually supporting vibrant city centers (the topic of this discussion) and b) making it viable to have excellent public transport lines that run into the suburbs.

There will always be loads of people who want to live in the suburbs, and few people who live in the suburbs will ever voluntarily live there without a car. However, in a city which has lots of people living in the center and good public transport systems, it becomes easier for the majority of suburbanites to live comfortable with one car rather than having to have a car for every adult in the family, and to use the car more for driving to other parts of the suburbs and out into the country, but probably not using it often to go into the center of town.

UK cities are (except London and a few other bits) in a bit of a difficult state, because they are hollowed out, with few residents living in the middle of the city, meaning that it's impossible to run proper public transport, and if everyone drives into the center of town in their cars the result is a traffic-clogged mess that nobody will want to spend time in anyway.

Interesting OP. I think you have a point. Councils have long seen cars as ways to make money from parking and congestion charging. Then this puts people off driving in and the centres decline

Where I live the council is considering congestion charging, and of course all the childless environmental warriors who live in the city are all for it. It won’t affect them after all!
But you really need a car if you live outside the Centre and public transport is infrequent and incredibly unreliable.

All the charge will do is discourage people from going into the city Centre

My local council is currently full of people like user.

They want to get rid of parking in the centre. However the main vocal active travel people have very nice houses, with drives, don't live in a flat etc... Idealism is great when it's for "other people."

We get the same rhetoric about change being painful too.

I found a very funny cartoon about the Oxford proposals and again it's all the same phrases that these people keep spouting from some central phrase book.

Personally I think theyre rapidly killing our town centre.

We rely on a car to get to work and school and I'm not brilliantly mobile so wouldn't be walking miles (not bad enough for a blue badge) either. Ultimately many people would become more isolated.

I sometimes wonder if they'd love everyone to work from home and amazon stuff and have home food delivery so they don't use their cars...

But we saw what isolation in covid did to mental and physical health.

Travel evaporation theory. The idea that we close half the roads / LTN/ Make people drive on congested roads and then the busy traffic... Evaporates. Ie people decide to stay at home instead of coming out. (they like to think they choose to cycle.)

I can't credit this as it was reposted on a local page.

Ah here's the story. Attached.

"pretty town".. You need somewhere that's pretty where people would go too without any shops, just to wander because it's nice to be there. Unfortunately many of these dead town centres are absolutely hideously ugly

First step should be remodelling them, murals on brutal brick, shop fronts attractive, trees, flowers, planting

Oh that came out muddled 🙈.

What a shame my techy powers got that wrong!

@Meadowfinch that sounds lovely! What town are you talking about? Currently researching where to move to from London.

@RampantIvy ha, ha- I think I would too if I came for a day or two - I guess after 17 days of crammed pavements and getting to work and struggling to get a coffee or do any serious early Xmas shopping , rather than just pottering- it kind of loses its appeal- however they do a lovely job of it and the lights and reflections onto the buildings and Abbey do give everywhere a lovely Xmas day feel I admit - as a non resident I would love it

Personally, I don't think public transportation should be evaluated on whether or not it is profitable. It is necessary. It can never be profitable for all areas but that doesn't mean that some areas should be left without access. I'm lucky that I live in an area with good public transport and people use it. I have a yearly travel card which cost me 50 euros (subsidised by my employer because they want to encourage people to leave their cars behind) but in any case, transport costs way less than in my parents' town in the UK. When we visit them I cannot afford to travel to the nearest town with my kids on the bus - and there are multiple bus companies so I have to change buses and get multiple tickets.

In my town, there is one bus company so you can easily get anywhere on multiple buses (one ticket lasts 90 minutes). Buses run 24 hours. It was not like this when I first moved here 20 years ago but there has been a real push to make the system work. On the flip side, in the last 20 years the public transport in my parents' town has got much worse - more expensive, far fewer routes, a more complicated ticketing system. A transport system needs to be simple to use, reasonably-priced, integrated into the local area so most people can use it. This costs money.

I’m 100% certain this is the same town I live in
The town council are brilliant and it is everything that @Meadowfinch has said it is
we moved 100+ miles from our hometown to live here as did lots of people I’ve have spoken to since moving here

DM me the name of the town plz 😄

@Buttalapasta when we lived in Copenhagen it worked in that way too- it did help that it had a good and very modern clean metro but the buses were good too and yet it is not a huge city- around same size and population as Leeds - it wasn't peanuts (it's Scandinavia) but it was less than the UK and the travel tix meant you could use metro and buses and no fannying around (similar system to London)

With regards to towns though and big villages- I'm with Labour on this- we need to get rid of business rates and just charge for services used (rubbish etc) this will encourage more smaller retail that will 'take a punt' - we need better council centralised funding again for capital expenditure. It's no point having a high st just full of betting shops, charity shops, vape shops and barbers, it needs a bit of everything for all income levels, the reverse is true if it's mainly a high income area and it's full of Nicknack shops and nice cafes- but you can't buy a mop and bucket , a pair of scissors or a packet of mints .

I realise councils are very strapped for cash but few are doing anything enticing to actually make people want to shop there and not all of it actually costs much to do, . Have a farmers market every other week on the Main Street or a 'car boot sale' on a little side street or a 'kids event' with face painting or a toy swap or something similar. Give small capital grants to retail for awnings or street furniture or fairy lights or planters.

Get a few volunteers out for patrolling for nuisance factors, rubbish tipped , graffiti etc -

Have a clean and warm drop in centre for pensioners and young mums/dads with children with them offer cheap coffee and tea , toast and crumpets , baby changing facilities , some toys and books in a corner, magazines, (ask local mums and dads to donate read. Ones- (I've always got a fair few hanging around) papers , details on walls of local groups to join , run it with a manger and volunteers , offer work experience to those in last 2 years at school . Get local appropriate business to sponsor at a low rate to cover off a few costs.

Have DM’d you 😊
Just to add, we moved out of a very popular city with everything available and before doing so considered everything mentioned on this thread and more
It has been absolutely life changing for us, for our quality of life
At the moment I am only missing Sainsbury’s which is a small price to pay 😂

@Meadowfinch my first thought was you live in Bath as we do (but it's a city albeit a small one, so possibly not ) or possibly Cheltenham or Salisbury or Tunbridge Wells ( doesn't have horse racing as far as I'm aware) or possibly Brighton ? All are as I mentioned earlier places that are good for a 'potter' - and that's what makes them very liveable. The fact you mentioned the big market square made me think of Salisbury- we sometimes go over on a Saturday as it's 45 minute drive for us - love that market square