COMMENT Walk through any UK town centre and you’ll see that times are tough for the high street. In the past year alone, several big-name brands and businesses have announced closures of stores across the UK, including Boots and Tesco, while Wilko shut all 400 of its stores.
The changing landscape of the high street is already having a knock-on effect on UK plc: business closures outnumbered business creations by record levels in 2023. According to the Office for National Statistics, there were more than 105,000 UK business closures in the first quarter of 2023, while just 79,000 new businesses were created – the largest net decrease on record.
It’s clear that the high street needs urgent resuscitation. But to do this we need to go back to what makes the UK high street special.
High streets have always been more than a “place to shop”: they are places where people gather and connect, where leading brands have homes and create destinations for new experiences and interactions.
If we are going to revitalise the high street, it’s important to go back to its roots – beyond a place for shopping – to think about how we can best capitalise on the heritage of high street architecture, industry and culture and the sense of community that these spaces have built over time.
For the past 200 years, Heal’s department store on London’s Tottenham Court Road has been a landmark for shoppers looking for the best of British furniture design. This 19th century building combined retail with space for manufacturing. It was the place where the first sprung mattress was made, with a production line running from the workshops straight through to the loading bays and shop floor.
Heal’s is a building that most Londoners have their own history with. I’ve met people who had their wedding registry at Heal’s and some who used to make a yearly pilgrimage there to buy Christmas decorations. These stories – of the people and place – were a key part of our vision when redeveloping the building and transforming it into a sustainable, creative workspace-led campus.
For us, the first step was to speak to the historic occupier, Heal’s, and find a way to collaborate that would keep it on site. The subsequent successful transformation of the building shows that by bringing together office, food and beverage, and retail spaces, you can take a major high street destination and give it back its economic viability, all while preserving its character and continued relevance in the heart of the city.
This isn’t an isolated case. The planned Oxford Street food hall at the former Evans clothing store and upcoming office conversion of Fenwick’s of Bond Street demonstrate a promising shift in the market to not only preserve but sustainably reimagine our high street buildings. Outside London, Edinburgh’s Debenhams store has received planning permission for a commercial conversion, with a mix of hotel rooms, meeting and wellness spaces, while Exeter’s House of Fraser store reopened as a hotel earlier this year. These kinds of approaches allow us to open up spaces that have been run down and closed off to the public and breathe new life into them. They save significant amounts of embodied carbon in the process – a must for developers looking meet changing industry standards.
As these examples show, there’s a lot that can be done to reimagine high street buildings, from hotels and offices to student accommodation and residential. Done right, this approach enables the characterful destinations which often define town centres to be retained, reinvented and celebrated, while creating unique new assets to drive the sustainable evolution of different sectors.
In the right cases, offices and retail can mix well together. The push by the City of London’s Destination City plan, designed to help the Square Mile shake off its nine-to-five image, and the increasing importance of connectivity and amenity spaces seen since the pandemic are indicative of a growing call for offices to offer more than simply spaces to work. Meanwhile, our high streets, which offer some of the most well-connected and amenity-rich areas in our city centres, are crying out for new activity. There’s a symbiosis here waiting to be taken advantage of.
In fact, the kind of flexible adaptive spaces that high street buildings offer could be prime locations for SMEs. Establishing creative hubs within high streets would not only encourage collaboration, it could create incubator spaces for start-ups to experiment, foster creativity and engage with the surrounding community. Adapting business rate models to offer incentives for SMEs in high street locations would be a big step towards helping to create a new financial model for these areas.
Sadiq Khan’s vision of London as a 24-hour city would also benefit from the combination of offices and retail by making sure that high streets evolve into dynamic environments that thrive day and night.
Just as we need to adapt to changing patterns of consumption when it comes to finding ways to reuse, recycle and repair consumer goods, by applying the same thinking to our high streets we can unlock new and improved circular economies, making sure that our heritage buildings have relevance for today’s and tomorrow’s cities.
Jacob Loftus is chief executive at General Projects
