A low point for the high street

Town centres must move away from an old world image to avoid extinction , writes Jonathan Glancey

Sorry, no cars. This is the first and abiding rule of High Street 2005, even on a Sunday shopping morning. Which means that affluent customers of UK plc like the Blurr family (and Inmaculada, the Guatemalan au pair) are forced to park their steam-turbine people-carrier in one of the 1,000 spaces located on several levels below the "Supastore Retrieval Center".

This massive, high-tech warehouse lurks discreetly behind the high street, which is now enclosed in glass and air-conditioned. An elevator from the parking lot takes the extended family up to the shops. Because this is a 30-second ride, banks of videos each showing a different satellite show are provided to keep the kids from getting bored.

While the family tumbles into the high street, immigrant labour (known as BMWs, or "Below Minimum Wagers") loads the trunk of the people-carrier with bulk foodstuffs and other heavy-duty household goods, ordered in advance, from the serried racks of the warehouse. The Supastore Retrieval Center (owned by Safebury and Gateco, the two surviving food giants) garners bulk food and goods from all over the world. It has nearly, but not quite, replaced the old edge-of-town and out-of-town superstores that dominated the British retail landscape in the Eighties and Nineties of the last century ...

Is High Street 2005 too much of an exaggeration? Perhaps, but something like it may well be necessary if the British high street is not to die in a few years. The car and superstore culture has all but bled it dry. Now, even the Government is concerned for its health. John Gummer is working hard to curb future edge-of-town and out-of-town developments in an effort to breathe fresh life into the patient. He may be too late, unless something like High Street 2005 takes shape.

Back in the future, the Blurrs' people-carrier is being loaded down with cases of Peruvian mineral water, boxes of eco-friendly washing powder and pallets of organic cat-litter, while the family graze along the high street. They snack at the colourful and familiar pizza, weenie and bhaji stalls parked along the street between restroom (wc) and environmental (tree) "facilities".

They check out possible lunch venues. Here's (yawn) the Thai Takeaway (you can find these at tram-cycle interchanges these days). Hmm, what about the Hanoi Noodle Bar? No, let's try Yak-U-Like ("wild food" for fans of popular Real-Reality adventure holidays in fashionable Mongolia and Kamchatka).

The kids can last about 30 minutes between snacks, so there's time to goof around the shops. On one side of the street is a string of speciality outlets owned by Safebury: Safebury the Butcher, Safebury the Baker and Safebury Home Illumination Store (candlestick maker). Parents are fond of the charmingly old-fashioned Safebury Sun-Dried Tomato shop ("very late Eighties").

If this string of shops sounds like a clever repackaging of one of the old Safebury edge-of-town stores, that's because it is.

But Safebury leases only one side of the street. The other is lined with one-off speciality shops that have sprung up since the revival of the high street at the turn of the century. These cater for the extraordinary variety of consumer tastes that have developed in Britain's multi-ethnic society. They also reflect such popular consumer movements as the Campaign for Real Food.

Some of the shops - Versace for Kidz - reflect the vast amount of money that affluent but guilty parents lavish on children now that a typical working week for a bread-winning professional woman is 70 hours.

Turn left at the end of the street and step back into ... 1995. Over the past decade, many British high streets have been stripped of traditional shops, which have had their profits cut to the bone by the growth of superstores. The argument for edge-of-town and out-of-town superstores is that they are convenient and offer car-borne shoppers a wide, sometimes vast, choice of reasonable quality goods, reasonably priced. The case against superstores is equally simple. They are ugly. They consume vast amounts of land. They encourage road building and needless use of cars. They persuade us to consume a weighty and bizarre confection of food transported from around the world with all that this entails - exploitation of cheap labour in poor countries, fuel consumption and the sight and sound of 40-ton diesel lorries grinding up and down our own busy roads.

But 30 years on from the advent of the supermarkets, the American imports that turned the high street upside down, it is the turn of these industrial giants to look old-fashioned. Now that more and more people are looking to buy specialist, exotic and "real" food and enjoy shopping as a leisure activity rather than as a chore, and now that food can be ordered over the phone and delivered to the home (as it was until the Sixties), the superstore, with its factory-like interiors, harsh fluorescent light, interminable queues and numb-minded check-out staff seems like a hangover from the conveyor-belt world of Henry Ford. Its saving grace is, as an estate agent might put it, convenience, convenience, convenience.

The latest thinking is that the high street can re-invent itself by becoming more specialist in the food, goods and services it offers. In successful high streets, this has already been happening. Tesco, for example, has opened 23 "Metro" stores since the first in London's Covent Garden in 1992.

"These are used mainly by city workers in a hurry to buy lunches and dinners for that day rather than the big weekly shop," says Karen Marshall, a Tesco spokeswoman, "but we are monitoring spending patterns. Since last May, we've also opened six Tesco Express stores in the London suburbs carrying only a few hundred lines." These are part of new Tesco petrol stations on the edge of suburban high streets and so are, as it were, a toe in the water rather than a headlong dive back into the high street. But they represent a shift in focus nevertheless.

Shaun Boney, head of town centre planning at Boots, says the chemists has had "a presence on our high streets for nearly 120 years ... the time has come for all companies or organisations who have a stake in town centres to work to improve the quality of this environment."

This view is supported strongly by the Royal Town Planning Institute. "It would be a disaster for many town centres if further out-of-town development occurred," says David Rose of the RTPI. "But we have to recognise the new world the high street operates in. We can't stick to romantic notions from a bygone age. We buy more now, and buy it in larger quantities and, as John Gummer has pointed out, we are a nation that likes to shop by car."

Fine words, however, butter no parsnips (whether muddy from high-street greengrocers or washed `n' wrapped from Safeway). A new survey by Mintel, Survival of the High Street, concludes that although middle-class shoppers pay lip service to the old-fashioned high street, their shopping patterns are "promiscuous" in practice. What Mintel says is this: "Higher than average penetration [of the high street] among working women and working manager groups among those exhibiting most loyalty to high streets and town centres has to be considered in the context of the high degree of promiscuity among these groups, especially working women." Translated, this means that the affluent will dip into the high street for odds and sods, but make for Sainsbury and Tesco for the weekend shop.

Mintel's research leads it to believe that a healthy future for the high street is by no means a foregone conclusion. It seems more likely that middle-class "promiscuity" will continue to damage the high street, which will continue to depend on "the least economically attractive shoppers ... since those aged over 65 and in sub-groups D and E are the most loyal to high streets and town centres".

Where there is a high concentration of wealth (Bath, Harrogate, Edinburgh), high streets continue to prosper, if in a Belgian chocolate shop kind of way. But where the critical mass of consumer spending falls below a certain point, the high street crumbles and is replaced by the drive-in burger, knock-down furniture culture that can be found along almost any arterial road leading traffic from city to motorway.

The big question is this: do we really want the old-fashioned high street back? Most of us have, somewhere in our minds, a fixed ideal drawn from a Hovis advert or else from a postcard bearing some such legend as "Cricklewood Broadway, 1925" with trams, dray horses and butchers standing under the striped awnings of their shops. But for all our weasel words extolling the days of small shops (remember when even Sainsbury was a handsome shop with its marble counters, mosaics, New Zealand cheeses and chatty assistants competent in mental arithmetic?) we are possibly too used to our cars and to notions of convenience and choice.

What is likely to happen is that the shopping patterns of the well-off and the poorly paid will divide. The affluent will still drive to superstores and amble around exclusive novelty shops in classy, pedestrianised high streets, while the badly off will drive to superstores and abandon the high street altogether. The Blurr family of 2005 may well make a weekend pilgrimage to the glass-enclosed high street, but their shopping list is likely to include aromatic massage oils and sun-dried mangoes rather than bread and potatoes.