Monday 1 April 2019

"Can Northampton's 'dying' High Street be saved?"

Finally, a measured article on the topic from the BBC, mentioning all the actual reasons why some High Streets are 'dying'.

The number of boarded up shop fronts in towns the length and breadth of England is symbolic of the country's growing High Street crisis. 

Perhaps nowhere quite encapsulates this as much as Northampton, which in the past five years has lost three major department stores with the future of a fourth uncertain.

Marks and Spencer, like many others, was lured away to the £140m Rushden Lakes retail park, which opened 15 miles east of Northampton in 2017...

Now, the future of the nearby Debenhams branch is uncertain. It has agreed a £200m refinancing lifeline with lenders but said it would continue with plans to cut the number of its stores...

In January 2008 the internet accounted for 5p in every £1 of retail sales. By August 2018, it was 18p in every pound...

Northampton is not only competing with online retailers and Rushden Lakes, but larger towns nearby with a greater selection of shops. Milton Keynes, for example, is a 15-minute train journey away and has a Marks and Spencer, House of Fraser and a John Lewis...

"Big towns and cities can attract the crowds and be a destination for a day out, while smaller centres [offer] convenience," says Kardi Somerfield, senior marketing lecturer at the University of Northampton. "So mid-range towns are particularly and disproportionately affected by store closures..."

Perhaps the answer lies in St Giles Street, which runs adjacent to Abington Street. It features a range of small, independent businesses from barbers to restaurants and - despite a handful of empty units - feels altogether more prosperous.

Lisa Witham, 29, runs the Dreams Coffee Lounge with her sister, Nina Neophitou, 25. She says the key to the street's success is simple. "There's a lot of lovely independent shops all offering different experiences for customers, rather than the generic High Street shops. The experience for the customer is important. Offer something a bit different that online and out-of-town retailers can't."

"There needs to be more support from the council and landlords, making sure we get the right businesses in," says Lisa. "There needs to be variety with the retail, with leisure options such as bowling or maybe an arcade. We have students nearby but they need an incentive to come into town. But the more empty units there are, the more difficult it is to attract new businesses. It's easy to get into a downward spiral."


The icing on the cake is that they don't try and blame it on Business Rates!

8 comments:

Lola said...

Lisa and Nina seem to be ideal YPP target voters...

Piotr Wasik said...

it is April's Fools Day. They will write tomorrow: we were only joking about internet, it is Business Rates that kill High Street, we got you :-)

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, yes.

PW. Bugger. I fell for it.

Bayard said...

Back in the last century, I read an article comparing Bath with a similar-sized historic town in France. Long story short, the article concluded that the shops in the centre of Bath were struggling because they were mostly chains and the landlords were not letting out the residential accommodation above the shops, resulting in the city centre becoming a residential desert. The result of this, as also picked up in the BBC article, is that more and more of the customers of the shops arrived by car, rather than on foot as local residents within walking distance. Once the customers were in their cars, a) they had to find somewhere to park and b) it was not much more difficult to go to the nearest out-of-town centre. The internet has only exacerbated a pre-existing problem. Funny how so many of the problems with our High Streets come down to bad decisions by landlords.

mombers said...

My understanding is that the book value of empty commercial premises can be given as a much higher figure than what it's actually worth if market rent was accepted. So an incentive to leave it empty rather than write it down. A real failure of regulation. A land tax would reduce the book value a lot and the financial institutions would have to look at it completely differently, as an asset that costs real money to keep empty or not, and not an abstract accounting entry.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, which might explain the relative success of St Giles Street.

M, agreed.

Bayard said...

M, I wonder how many of the owners of the businesses in St Giles St live above the shop and/or how many of the shops have living accommodation above them.

Robin Smith said...

We stayed in Montague on the Gardens next to the British Museum and dined at Gauthier Soho last weekend. Lovely.

I was shocked to see the number of speculative vacancies in both Covent Garden and Soho.

My partner lives next to Rushden Lakes. Its a fantastic shopping centre and thats why people go there. Milton Keynes too. Northampton is a real dump except for the enormous town hall recently renovated(but what for?) Even on a Saturday afternoon its uncomfortable to walk around the town, being full fo drug addicts and welfare recipients. Thats why there's such a low level of quality footfall passing shops.

Council policy might be
1) stop subsidising rents of council owned units
2) quickly adopt policy suiting the current environment aka convert the town centre to housing
3) and of course raise business rates to 100% of the annual rental value to spend on improving the centre :)