To think without retail we have to plan what to use our high streets for?

[omygoditsearly]

So retail has been in decline for years, covid has hastened the end of many large stores and changed habits. But we still have the physical infrastructure so what do we want to do with it?
Much retail space pave has been snapped up by property developers to build rabbit hutches but I can't see that working once a high street is gone. I suppose some could be bulldozed and consumed by urban sprawl but then many are older or protected so that would be difficult too. Does any one have any thoughts on how these spaces may be used in the future?

Good thread. I've also been thinking about this. I think they'll have to become more social and experience focused: coffee shops, restaurants, theatres, arts classes, things like escape rooms and board games cafes.
I'd honestly love that tbh.

Since the pandemic our local small high street has seen off the last of the tourist type gift shops (for the time being).
There is a new butchers, a local brewery bottle shop, a wine retailer, a greengrocer. The wool and handicrafts shop has moved to bigger premises (used to be a cafe). Former shops have also become High Street presence for a local bathroom company who are also taking over an old pub to become a kitchen showroom. A former shop is ready to open as a gin bar/wine bar. And finally a tanning shop is ready to open
Our local high street has transformed in a year.

Personally, I'm hoping that we'll finally get a Uniqlo in Leeds as surely they'll now want to move into the empty Top Shop, Debenhams, Dorothy Perkins, or one of the many other shops that are now empty.
I'd love a Uniqlo in my local city. Don't mind all the shops selling the fast fashion rubbish being gone, I want good quality basics.

A board game cafe in town would be amazing!

I agree with other posters some will be converted to housing while I hope others will turn into independent shops. I'd like to see the return of high quality butchers, bakeries, little coffee shops and restaurants. Mixed in with some smaller clothes shops.

I think it depends on the kind of town you already have. Mine has been dying for years. It has a couple of banks (so fairly rare round here), numerous pound/ buy everything here shops, a butcher, sayers, savers, Iceland, then the rest is barber shops, dog groomers, beauty shops or kebab shops.

It's made worse by the fact we currently have a massive problem with a couple of groups of kids who like to throw things at passing cars and abuse pedestrians and a fairly large spice and smackhead community who hang out in front of one of the pubs.

I think knocking the whole place down and starting again might be one idea.

High streets offering a diverse range of activities/experiences, board game cafes, community spaces for learning/course/classes etc., shared office space, housing of all types, markets with varied, quality produce. It would be great if local communities got the chance to choose what they would like. I am ready to stop shopping on line and get out and experience real life again. Uniqlo is a good shout...

@Pyewhacket

It’s very difficult converting large purpose built retail properties into housing so you’d have to knock them down and rebuild and that is incredibly expensive.

This is such an important factor. ‘Converting’ retail is going to be a nightmare. And in the meantime High Streets will become very unattractive places to live.

Already lots of cities were struggling with too much out of date commercial and retail space that no one wanted. Commercial buildings are much more valuable than most residential buildings, so for the value of their portfolio, the owners would rather hang on to them empty.

It absolutely should become housing. Close to public transport etc, far better all round than out of town developments that destroy our green spaces and have no facilities. The trouble is, the development is more expensive (less profitable) for the developers than using virgin land

Yes, I don't mean convert to housing, I mean knock it down and start again.

I would love for the centre of our towns not to be revolving around consumerism. Big parks, cafes etc lovely. Let's move away from buying stuff we don't need and build communities.

@SpiderinaWingMirror

Since the pandemic our local small high street has seen off the last of the tourist type gift shops (for the time being). There is a new butchers, a local brewery bottle shop, a wine retailer, a greengrocer. The wool and handicrafts shop has moved to bigger premises (used to be a cafe). Former shops have also become High Street presence for a local bathroom company who are also taking over an old pub to become a kitchen showroom. A former shop is ready to open as a gin bar/wine bar. And finally a tanning shop is ready to open Our local high street has transformed in a year.

sounds amazing. ..sort of place I would like to live!

Commercial buildings are much more valuable than most residential buildings, so for the value of their portfolio, the owners would rather hang on to them empty

Given that there's likely to be far fewer retail or office based businesses willing to pay high city centre rents and rates from now on, I don't understand this. It's not like housing, where 'people always need somewhere to live'.

Right now it makes no more sense to wait for retail or office demand to jump back up again than it would to expect large scale coal mining to restart. And in the meantime, they have the cost of maintaining the buildings and keeping them secure etc.

Knock down the shooing centres, have a massive park surrounded by restaurants and cafes, libraries, youth centres, within the park have a play area and a lake or pond, lots of seating, table tennis outdoor gym stuff. Picnic tables for socialising. Trees too. Oh I'd like to design it all myself!

Actually, the local plan for our becoming deserted town centre, is for mixed retail leisure and residential. They're planning to know it down, creating a new park, new restaurants and small amounts of shops, plus new homes. All within a stone's throw of the station and the hospital. I'm a little nervous about how well it will be done, but excited at the prospect.

@SmokedDuck

I'm not convinced that an online retail sector is a great thing for cities or the people in them. If there is a plan to be made I think it should include reversing this trend as much as possible.

Online shopping is great for our local economy. A New amazon warehouse has opened up half a mile from our house and employed a large number of local people. This is an area of low investment and low employment. Having amazon here has been massive.

The whole reason our economy has been hit so hard is that it has relied on the high Street and physical retail sector for much too long. Areas like where I live are crying out for factory and warehouse employment, not retail.

I'd love to see the return of smaller enterprises in towns. I'm fed up of seeing endless jewellery , mobile phone and tat shops.
Big chains should keep to city centres or large towns and act almost like showrooms.

It would be so lovely to have a mooch in a fishmongers, haberdashers, patisserie,craft studio etc...

I like the retail as a service model. As a retail worker it's the part I enjoy most about the job anyway. That means no bland stores full of shelves and disinterested staff, but staff who know the product range really well and are trained to demonstrate and advise, and stations set up in the shop so that you can try things out or compare properly and get a feel for how they are used. I know not everyone wants that service (I am not hugely a fan as a customer) but if you do, and it's good, then it works really well, and I think it would start to feel normal rather than intrusive and salesy. Hopefully competition and expectation would cause this kind of thing to improve over time as well. It offers an alternative to buying online because you always have the store to come back to as a kind of service centre, like the apple stores.

I honestly think independent shops/salons, even private health care clinics, a few restaurants, pubs, maybe the old Woolies turned into an art gallery. A couple of “community hubs” like village halls that you can hire out for parties and events and use to perform and rehearse plays, have brownies and scout meetings. (There are no village halls in my newly built village - literally nothing, you have to travel two or three towns over or hire a hotel)
A cafe/bar set up to help the teenagers find sensible work local to them.
Reduced rates for local people.
Proper old fashioned sweet shops and toy shops and comic book stores.
Something REAL we can actually make use of!

Absolutely, services will be the way to go, the more personalised the better.

A retail shop is just a guess at the sort of things people might want to buy. How often have you found something you like but they didn't have it in your size or the colour you wanted. We have got used to having to visit lots of shops to find what we want. Sales have been used to to get rid of the stock that didn't find it's mark.

Online shopping is more likely to have the size/colour you want, but returns are a pain.

There is a role for a more service related offering, something like M&S's click and collect service. You say ahead of time what you want to try and then go in to try on, but anything you want and leave everything else to be returned painlessly.

Higher level service would be more like a personal shopping service, where you explain the sort of thing you want, such as occasion clothes, an interview suit or just a seasonal update to you let wardrobe. Again, you make an appointment to try on. Maybe combined with hairdressers and beauticians.

Another personalised service is the one Selfridges provided where your body is scanned and a pair of jeans made to suit your exact shape.

Maybe combined with a gym on premises.

Looking forward to trying some of these.

Those sound a bit more high end than I was thinking. I was thinking more like toy shops where they have demos of different sets, things available to play with and try out, staff that can advise if you like this you'll like that, what to get for an 8yo boy or whatever. Or a kitchen items store with a little camping stove so you can try out different pans. Someone doing a demo of this gadget or that gadget. Cookery classes demonstrating techniques you can do with certain equipment or good knife technique, etc etc.

Not to say high end services wouldn't be good too, but I think it might be less cost effective and wouldn't be a viable model.

@terribletea our local shopping centre has 10 acres of land all the way around it converted into walks, parks, a seaside area, a permanent amusement park, a massive amphitheatre, gardens you can walk through, lakes, outdoor picnic areas, game tables for chess/backgammon, an outdoor gym, several “play stations” for children with interactive walls, a maze and an outdoor climbing area.
If you walk towards the shopping centre there’s a library, lots of bars, cafes and restaurants, a couple of street vendors and the ski slope/ice rink and bowling alley.
It’s INSIDE the shopping centre that’s a mess. The outside and surrounding area is perfect, but with the loss of Debenhams, BHS and a few others the inside is really looking ghostly.

I love the huge markets you see in Europe. All the different stalls with fresh produce and wine bars, coffee, and tapas bars in between. They're so buzzy. People are there shopping and hanging out with friends. Why can't we have that in the UK? The damn shopping
Malls that sprang up everywhere are so depressing and make every town look the same with the same shops

The planning policies in the UK haven't been very good so far, so it seems unlikely the government or local authorities will listen to sensible ideas.

Local authorities have built many massive out of town retail parks and. Office developments, encouraging businesses to move out of the centres. Meanwhile, parking is heavily restricted and policed but transport infrastructure hasn't kept up, meaning that high streets are gradually bleeding footfall. Business rates meanwhile are prohibitive.

In the Netherlands, local authorities and givernment planning policy mean very few out of town retail parks and even large supermarkets. Smaller supermarkets instead are integrated into high streets where individual shops flourish and transport links are good, meaning city centres are still busy. (its also possible to deduct travel to work expenses from your tax bill even if not running a business). Obviously that would work well, but it's Britain, so all we get are these next big thing, quixk fix" type policies.insrrad, backed up by money grans which make travelling to and living in City centres difficult.

I own a residential rental property in a British city centre and I can tell you that once the students were sent home in the first lock down and the tourists are discouraged, there are very few people wanting to live in city centres. The locals all want a new build on the outskirts. Meanwhile, the LA still makes it expensive to rent out in the first place, with change of use planning permission required for anything over 5 people or a holiday let, and various licenses and permits. I pay around £3500 per year just for the right to rent it out to tenants, plus 40% income tax. The fabric of the historic buildings around me is deteriorating, because owners just can't afford to keep paying so much money. There are no grants available as in other countries.

Nottngham more or less knocked down a huge 60s shopping centre then the developer went bust so it's now a building site. Doubly unfortunate as its on the main route into town from the station. Recently a suggestion was made to convert the space into an urban park - a brilliant idea imo.