watching a town completely die

[BlessedByTheShitFairy]

This is so sad really, the town where I grew up. I know many business folded during covid and many high street staples have been closing for years, but this is different.

It's a large town, over 400K population, had a bustling, varied and thriving centre for most it's history, has now lost, and many before covid:

Debs, Next, M&S, Topshop, H&M, Body Shop, its central post office, game shops, cafes, most youth related places such as skating, bowling, carts, ALL restaurants (no exaggeration), health food stores, 2 shopping centres, most pubs, it's huge market, several banks, nightclubs, a town centre co-op, Spar, book shops, many charity shops and all of it's high end hair salons. Even the Starbucks slid off and the main post office was reduced from around 10 staff to 1 and shoved into a tiny toilet sized cubicle on the periphery of the borough.

These have been survived and replaced by - pop up eyebrow/lashes salons, fast food joints, poundshops, phone-unlocking shops, cash converter type shops, Primark (it's only remaining clothes store), Iceland, and the rest if boarded up. Interestingly a ton of privately owned car parks have taken over the area and hardly anyone uses them. It is unrecognisable from even 7 years ago. It now only attracts crime, heavy drinking, and a much less diverse population.

I know many towns have experienced closures of big brands, and things are simply changing (the net, everything online, etc) but this is really extreme, especially in comparison to a few years ago, it was not particularly suffering a decline. I do know that the council slowly sold off everything over the years, and have sent 2 huge shopping centres to their doom by selling to overseas investors who never came and filled them, so they are like enormous empty spaces that attract crime.

I don't currently live there but my remaining family that do say they never go in to town anymore, and feel forced to buy everything from standalone supermarkets in other areas.
I live in a fairly average town that has seen changes but there are also attempts at rejuvenation. Things are still ok and thriving in the centre. I am also aware that many towns are coping ok, taking the rough with the smooth, even though these issues have increased across the uk over all.

What could have happened to this one? Why so desolate and different? It is like the council just gave up sold it off and turned away. It never used to suffer so much crime, and the sound of police and ambulances is constant around the area now. The town centre was it's pride and joy, had so much put into it (festivals, events), so I can't understand how it got so bad.
Even the people who you see there now are all strangely similar (dress the same, same behaviours) and the diversity has vanished. Curiously rents are still super high and I have no idea who is taking them, if at all.

I feel sad about it because I grew up there, and have so many good memories of my teens when it was thriving, packed and full of interesting places to go and shop. The pubs were visited from far and wide, and it had a great college, access to learning, and much more culture. Now it is lucky to hold on to a handful of football clubs and that's the only interest left. Where and why did everything just die? It was previously so bloody alive.

I live in a town with a population of about 65 000 and I've always thought of it as run down, but it's not nearly as run down as yours sounds, OP. We have lost quite a few major shops over the years, and there seem to have been more phone shops, tattoo shops and vaping shops than anything else opening in their place, but there is still a fair bit of variety and in particular lots of restaurants and cafés. There's only one main shopping street in the town, and there seems to be a tendency for shops to move from one end of it to the other, so that one end continues to look "thriving" while the other end has a lot of empty shops and tat shops.

What puzzles me is that businesses apparently don't thrive and they close down or move out to the retail parks on the edge of town (we lost our H&M very suddenly too!), yet there always seem to be lots of people wandering about in the town centre. The mainstream shops we do have, like Primark, Wilkinsons, WH Smith and the pound shop, are often very busy (to the extent that it feels a bit uncomfortable during Covid). So if all these people are still going into town, why can't it sustain a full range of shops? I sort of feel that if they put them there, people would use them. There's a very good public transport network here, people shouldn't feel unable to go into town because of any parking issues.

@MarshaBradyo if you are interested there's an excellent guardian article about the decline of bolton and other mainly northern cities too. Really eye opening
www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/aug/22/bolton-decline-northern-town-centre-slump

Especially the comments section and the follow up article. Combination of an inept labour council and a government in thrall with austerity plus lots of other things !

Or the Council could just scrap the parking charges before the town centres totally die? It's a false economy.

Because all that nice to have stuff costs money and generated no income.

It does generate income. Taxes. Spend in local businesses. Therefore local people thriving and having money to spend themselves in other businesses like hospitality etc. And more likely to then, if thriving, be in better health. And cost less money from other taxpayers in benefits. Etc.

Do we want a self-enforcing downwards spiral or an upwards one?

Thanks for this I found it interesting

Really depressing for people there, it ends on a slightly more positive note such a shame we were hit by pandemic and now cost of living crisis / Ukraine war, but it would be nice if that trajectory mentioned continued

Where I live is not as bad as this but is getting there.

Parking is such a big one. Expensive and inconvenient. Plus multistorey spaces designed for cars from the 90s, not big family suvs most people have now. I just can't squeeze in to the spaces without a lot of stress.

I think certain businesses should be subsidised by the council if they provide a community service. Eg there was a lovely play centre for preschoolers that shut down due to high rates. But we used to go there regularly and as I was in town used to pop to a few shops too.

I think nice cafes / restaurants now drive traffic in to town more than the shops do.

Most councils are killing their High Streets. We've a green controlled council and they've just hiked their car park prices too despite widespread warnings that the shops are suffering reduced custom.

Local authorities are a joke. I live near a big city in which I used to work and they are introducing road charging, in addition to high parking charges for entering the city.

Yet the public transport takes an hour and a half each way to get the 8 miles from the city centre. Its a bus from one busy suburb where they have built lots of new build housing. It takes 1 and a half hours not because the roads are busy (they are progressively emptier) but because, being a bus, it stops at every single stop to let off one passenger or to let on one passenger. And every single stop is designed to be just before a set of traffic lights, so the bus then gets stuck waiting at the traffic lights. This also holds up all the other traffic too.

Its just a misery. And of course the bus doesn't stick to a reliable timetable, and sometimes it just doesn't turn up at all. Theres no footpath from my house to where the bus leaves from because the local authority no longer cuts the grass verges and its become so overgrown its been destroyed by neglect.

The council's solution? To introduce road charging, on top of high parking costs.

I suspect in 10 years time, some team of "experts" will be paid a fortune in taxpayer's money to produce a study to say that poor public transport and road charging have killed the city centre and they have to make it cheaper and easier to access by car.

It sounds exactly like Northampton, where I live.

All the decent shops are either completely gone, or have downsized into such pokey small units as to be not worth a look in any more.

No one I know goes into the town centre for shopping any more, because it's just a dive. I last went in... maybe 4/5 months ago now, on a Saturday morning, when it should have been at it's busiest. And it was dead. Only people around were homeless people in doorways, drunks collapsed on benches, and groups of foreign men all shouting at each other.
10 years ago even, the place would have been heaving with families and shoppers. Now everyone just goes to the new-ish out of town shopping place, which is about a 20-25 minute drive for me.

I am very aware however, that it's all a self-fulfilling prophesy. People don't go, because there's no good shops and it's shabby. And it's shabby, with no good shops, because people don't go.

OK, scrap the parking charges. Which, as a PP who knows what she is talking about notes, is one of the few levers councils have to raise revenue. What then? Where is the shortfall coming from?

Raise business rates? No, innumerable PPs have demanded that the councils ‘get the rates down’ to encourage shops and hospitality in town centres.

Raise council tax? Imagine the howls of fury! The loudest from the people who don’t like paying to park, I imagine. Councils are limited in how much they can increase council tax by, anyway.

Cut services? Which? Most are cut to the bone anyway. More than 50% of a typical council’s spending is on social care. Since many people would rather die than permit granny’s house to be sold to fund granny’s care, meaning that the cost of caring for older people falls entirely to the council unless they enforce charges (which I’m in favour of), I can’t see that cost going down any time soon, can you?

In any event, you only have to look at this page to see that even free parking in town centres would attract complaints. A PP moans that the spaces in the multi-storey aren’t big enough for her SUV. Bad council! Many towns weren’t designed to offer acres of free parking in the centre, anyway. Where would you shoehorn in a big free car park in central Wigan? Preston? Chester? More than five minutes’ walk from the centre of town and everyone would be crying that it’s too far to walk.

We don’t really have parking charges in this borough so it would be interesting to see where funding comes from instead

Where I last lived we had residential zone charges - eg £80 a year but we don’t even have that and parking is free pretty much everywhere

Not sure where the difference is made up

Northampton has a great theatre, gallery and uni and the river but Milton Keynes has totally ruined it for retail. It has nice old buildings too so it feels like it could be a good place for small independents but the rents would have to be slashed and lots of cultural events brought in

Exactly this.

Re councils making up for a shortfall in money from free parking - they need to think longer term. What’s the point of parking charges if no one goes into town ( and business are the next to move out out after retail.)

If more people visit the shops with a free hour that means more retailers would be attracted to the town. Use small units for pop up shops with short term rates. Generate revenue with events. What’s currently free but takes up a lot of council money - skate parks spring to mind. Charge for those things.

On a local fb page a Councillor from the town insisted the council don't make money from parking, it simply covers their costs.
I don't understand this because
a) all the payment machines are the sort that don't give change so they must make money by people over-paying
B) the carparks are way more expensive than other nearby towns. I don't understand why their costs are greater? (They don't have barriers or lifts or anything "extra" to maintain.) The carparks we are talking about are basically a tarmac one level area with spaces marked out.

You told us earlier that you live in a charming area of the south east with a thriving high street full of independent shops. That’s the difference. Poorer areas, like Wigan, have to spend more on e.g. dealing with the effects of deprivation, looking after old people who don’t have many assets, providing transport to school and educational support for poorer kids.

That’s why your council don’t have to raise as much revenue as others. The council tax in Westminster is the lowest in the U.K. partly for that reason and partly because they have big shops on their patch who can’t easily relocate to an out of town retail park, or don’t want to, so the business rates are healthy. Westminster council also do well with parking charges, for obvious reasons. That’s how they keep the council tax low.

Charming might be pushing it but yes it is full of independent shops. It’s SE London btw so a mix of incomes including housing estates, we’ve been here twenty years when it was more a place people didn’t move to.

It is a more captive shopper though, far harder to access a large retail centre than if you have a choice near Trafford shopping centre etc

plus the pandemic has seen a big rise in wfh which has drawn people back to local area

I don’t blame pp who go for ease of parking etc but can see it impacts towns, usually if something needs to change an incentive helps

As soon as houseprices require a dual income to buy then there is no-one but the retired and unemployed and rich to go shopping in the daytime. Out of town shopping is open later and on Sundays.
30 years ago a single income was enough. Town centers did well. Now they dont..Wigan has very few idle rich, so he shoppers are low income and profits are low.
Either town centers change to different hours or shut down. 9 to 5.30 shopping is simply, logically not sustainable.

30 years ago a single income wasn’t really enough to buy a house.l bought mine in 88 but it took 2 of us to afford it.

l remember many single friends moaning about how they couldn’t afford houses in the early 90’s. I think interest rates were quite high.

Yeah they were high. That made it much harder for single people.

Might be missing the point to argue the specifics here. ?

I wonder if the nostalgia is part of the problem here in that it's easier to look to the past than the future and it's human nature to want to try and replicate something familiar rather than face the unknown.

Like or not we can't go back to the model of shopping we had two generations ago. Couples are both expected to work, people don't want to commit to spending every Saturday doing a family shop across multiple locations. Internet shopping exists.

I do wonder if in general we need to make public transport more appealing rather than just whinging at people to give up cars.

Sad to hear about Wigan, grew up a few miles away and as teenagers that was our exciting Saturday destination to shop in C&A. Now living in a small town in the Scottish Borders, which is doing fairly well. There are a few empty shops, but they don't stay empty for long. The town centre is fairly busy, with free parking, cafes, restaurants, and one big supermarket on the edge of town. It is not big enough to have ever had department stores and the like, and is at least 40 miles from places with M&S, John Lewis, Primark, big furniture stores etc, so I guess more convenient to keep shopping in town, hence its relative success.