The High Street is open for business. Debenhams has closed. And now we can all go out, we can see that there are plenty of other ‘units’ boarded up. My, there are some very big gaps in town/city centres. Footfall was falling well before the pandemic. It seems unlikely that those big retail units are going to be fully occupied any time soon.
When I was a teen, I’d regularly go to town just for something to do. I’d wander around and browse. Of course, there were plenty of record shops for me to visit but I’d look at clothes, watches, anything really. There were precious few places to eat. Plenty of pie shops but the only hot food available was in a chippy or the top floor of a department store and then strictly at lunchtime. I used to take my own sandwiches.
Now, I don’t browse at all. I go to shops for something specific. Buying clothes online has been hit and miss, so I prefer to go to an actual shop. More than 90% of my music is purchased online (the record shops don’t have what I want any more). I don’t think I’d ever buy jewellery online but I don’t actually buy jewellery at all. Food I can get locally or at a supermarket where I can park for free. Parking in town costs real money. However, these days there is no shortage of eateries.
There are out-of-town retail parks. They have everything, attempting to attract people for a day out. Free parking, lots of hot food, plus entertainment such as cinemas or game centres, often all under the same roof. I find them dispiriting and soulless.
To be honest, I cannot imagine going into a town centre very much in the future. I might hit them for a specific smash and grab every now and then. Otherwise, the little I actually need, I’m likely to walk round the corner or stay in the warmth and buy from the internet.
Unless.
When I qualify for a bus pass, I could have a day out, pick some nice fish from the market, enjoy some small independent retail business, drink a coffee, maybe see a film or visit an art gallery or library. I could take the grandchildren on a little trip.
However, things are going to have to change. Town centre business rates and rents are prohibitive. Tax needs to be more fair so that the independents can stand a chance up against the mighty Tax Dodgers. Car parks need to be free. Do we really believe that we can build back better after the pandemic or is this government of chancers going to continue to look after its mates?
Jonathan Richman had fun shopping, back when I was 18. I’m hoping there is still some fun to be had into the future.
My first online purchase – a CD, inevitably – was from a site called Streets Online. The future was right there in the name. Warehouses are bigger than shops and search boxes work faster than any shop assistant (sorry, “sales executive”): while this is true the high street will continue to die. Turn it into flats: rip up those shabby bricks that they’ve pedestrianised everywhere with and let the grass grow.
The high street didn’t do itself any favours – the sneering and snootiness in clothes shops, the cheerful fuckshouldIknow ignorance of staff nearly everywhere, the fact that in England at least for thirty odd years every town centre looked the same.
All that said, I’d give my left lung to have just one last half hour in Nottingham’s Selectadisc circa 1989. Probably with a trolley this time.
Ah Moose. I worked in retail for 15 years and me and my colleagues did give a fuck. We tried, we served, we worked hard.
I did say nearly everywhere. The sad thing is that customer service has really upped its game in the last 20 years in the UK, too late alas.
Here in the USA, or more specifically in southern California, the idea of paying to go shopping is laughable. Every supermarket and shopping mall has (usually plenty) of free parking.
Contrast that with a visit to the UK a few years ago. I land at Heathrow and head to my sisters in Hampshire, only she’s been held up picking up her son from school so I have an hour or so to kill. I head to Fleet to get a SIM card for my cell phone (so I can have a UK phone number while I’m there). There is literally nowhere to park on any street in the town centre, so I have to head for the multi storey car park. You have to pay on the way in. And it only takes tokens. I’ve been in the country for about 2 hours, I changed a few sheckels at the airport so I have a little bit of cash, but now I need tokens?
Dear Fleet Town Council – could you find a more inconvenient way of welcoming people from out of town?
On the plus side, I did get a great haircut at the Turkish barbers.
To be honest I blame the USA for the sad state of the British High street. Out of town shopping malls invented for lazy Americans found favour over here. So too megastores like Toys R Us – soulless and as appealing as genital warts. Homogonisation was the order of the day and before too long footfall in town centres was falling due to the economic terrorism of stores like Walmart (Asda).When they open on brownfield sites they aim to put nearby competing stores out of business as quick as possible. When Waitrose opened their new store in Lichfield, Tesco bought all of the billboard space in the town centre so that they couldn’t advertise.
We shouldnt be taken in by these companies- they are not part of the community they are there to kill the community.
Don’t blame the supply. Blame the demand.
If the communities didn’t want the malls, the communities wouldn’t contain any malls.
Which takes us back to the electorate and the politicians.
Or, the Chicken and the egg. ( frivolous giggles)
Yer average punter is easily swayed. Like it or not this is a fact.
A mind-boggling amount of money gets spent on telling people they need those superstores and those Tory politicians. The people behind it all have plenty to spend on getting what they want. Your local/high street retailers and the other political parties/independents do not.
Our legal system values property over people. Our education system doesn’t seek to produce people who think, it seeks to produce productive people who fit into the system.
The whole blame the punter thing isn’t that accurate. Banbury now has a new out of town centre that no one really wanted. Not once it became apparent that it wouldn’t come with a new cinema – which they did want. What they got was down to who was footing the bill.
Of course, it would fold if no-one went. And a few stores have already been and gone. And as the parking is free, well why not visit the M&S there rather than pay in the town centre.
Quite often the public just gets what its given.
I think this brings us back to needing to make the distinction between shopping to get stuff and shopping as a leisure activity. When I want to buy something, I want as little hassle as possible and as much choice as possible. If I want to buy a hammer, it’s fairly unlikely I want to buy a jumper and a saucepan at the same time so I want to drive up to the hammer shop, get in, get out and get home.
I’ve loved browsing through the racks of record shops but the choice was never large enough. A trip to HMV in Oxford Street in the 70’s was like nirvana and so the imitators arrived. Soulless they may have been (although that CD pressing plant in the basement of the Virgin Megastore was fascinating) but they had the stuff. The only thing better would be a shop with even more stuff.. enter “The Internet”!
I’m not sure what your point is. It seems like you like shopping.
I don’t like ‘high street’ shopping.
Out of town and the Internet is the only way to shop as far as I’m concerned.
4Funny how views differ. Out of town shopping is exactly what I dont want. I like high streets with quirky shops and individual book shops/record shops/clothes shops. They do exist somewhere but not anywhere near me.it always amazes me that there are individual sole trader stores all over London yetthey must have really high rents. It doesnt deter the owners and I dont see many closed for business
Agreed. Out of town shopping is the pits. Worst of all worlds. You pretty much have to drive, the place will have no character or surprise to it, you can predict the shops to within a tiny margin of error. Can’t see what’s to like. But as this thread proves, meat=poison etc.
Mall shopping is for people who only want the same things that their neighbours have.
There’s the rub. I don’t like shopping so the quicker I can get in and out the better. If I can park right outside, even better. Surely the bigger the shop, the more choice. What’s wrong with having the same thing as the neighbours? If it’s the thing I want, I don’t give a damn if it’s common. I guess it depends of the type of shop though. In the old days, when most record buying was done on the high street, the lack of choice meant that you were more likely to get the same CD as your neighbours.
There is a culture clash here, for men particularly, between the 20th century way and the 21st century way.
Culturally, men avoided shopping except for tools or hardware and left the rest of it to the women. Clothes shopping was mostly a chore, not a pleasure.
If you went shopping with the girls you were generally looked on as a hindrance, not an asset except as a means of transport.
These days men seem to shop more and do it more freely.
I’m firmly in the 20th century with my shopping habits. I don’t browse, I know beforehand roughly what I want and I go shopping to get it. When shopping online I still stick to that model, for the most part.
“In the old days, when most record buying was done on the high street, the lack of choice meant that you were more likely to get the same CD as your neighbours.”
Not on planet Afterword it didn’t!
You make it sound like people went CD shopping determined to bring something home, whatever it was, as long as it was a polycarbonate disc about 5 inches across, and then gave in and bought what their neighbours had just because the shop had a poor selection available. Those shops were called WH Smith, and no-one ever bought a CD from them except grannies looking for Birthday presents.
I remember that CD pressing plant at Virgin! The operatives had white coats like it was some secret laboratory.
I worked a short walk from Tottenham Court Road in the 80 and I witnessed the exponential growth of that store.
Don’t blame the supply. Blame the demand.
Ah, yes, that conundrum again. The public wants what the public gets (as long as their pals over the pond got given it first).
Let the boys all shout for tomorrow
La la la la….
Fleet is spectacularly difficult to park in. The car parks are baffling (and I am a local). The Turkish Barber is very good though.
Fleet …. hmmm …. Fleet in Hampshire …. isn’t that where former Word supremo Mark Ellen is from?
It is. His dad was a vicar there – had a brief chat with him at a meet up. He also went to the Dylan Blackbushe gig (2 miles from Fleet) and we had a chat about that. Thats about everything one can talk about Fleet.
You’re bang on there Tiggs. You make me sad for today’s youngsters who will never know, or understand, what it was once like to wander the high street just for the sake of it. Things would need to change a lot to ever get back to a vibrant high street that fills with people every day, and more so at weekends. I very much doubt they will do so.
The shopping days I remember from yonks ago; driving into town with my mum, parking up for tuppence, wandering the shops just looking at stuff we couldn’t afford, getting fresh fish from Lil’s and then fresh veg from the big stall with trestle tables draped in produce from the Tamar Valley market gardens, both in the covered market, then scoffing Ivor Dewdney’s finest for lunch, getting the Victor and the Hornet for me, and the Beano for my little bro’ and then getting home in time to get supper for dad when he got back from work. Family run businesses, artisan craftspeople, British manufactured goods in abundance. Mostly gone, unlikely to reappear.
And the weekends: into Dingles so mum could buy some material and some new sewing bits and bobs, down to the Treasury once a month to pay the City the mortgage payment, strolling down to Woolies so I could drool over some new Betta Builda bricks and my little bro’ could gawp in frustration at the cost of his Lego equivalents, settling for a big bag of pick’n’mix instead, goodies to enjoy in front of the telly after supper, mum and dad bumping into pals from their youth, having a good old chin wag while us kids got bored and started pretending we had sore feet, only to recover instantly once the parental nattering drew to a close, asking mum & dad, “Who was that?” once they’d gone, only to be none the wiser once told. Weekend shopping as a family destination with no real purpose except to search out specific things and hope you’d spot some pals you hadn’t seen for ages.
Well known high street shops that had been trading for a hundred years or more, little local butchers and bakers with small shops, small ovens, few staff but a dedicated crowd of regular customers, shops that appeared to survive though they did little trade. Junk shops – ‘The Sign Of The Golden Eagle’. Bicycle shops. Picture Framers. Shops selling blinds and curtains. Stamp collector’s shops. Proper tobacconists. Largely gone, with a smattering of exceptions mostly in smaller market towns. Unlikely to reappear in larger conurbations.
What have we got instead, in droves of depressing replication? Malls. FFS. Identical from one end of the land to the other. All shite. All selling tat from the other side of the planet made by people who are just glad to work for pence an hour in dodgy conditions if it means they don’t have to live in squalor anymore. All owned by billionaire run conglomerates and investment funds floging the manufacturing output of Communist dictatorships and dystopic tyrannies.
In short, I think shopping as a social diversion, certainly as it was half a century ago, is utterly finished. The market has seen to that.
Totes, foxy. Have a thumb up.
Nah. Clothes shops will be alright. Girl shopping isn’t like boy shopping, and people who care how they look will always need to try things on.
I’m actually quite happy about the future of town centre retail. Food. Cafes. Restaurants. Pubs. Bars. Clubs. Clothes shops. All the best things. But now with added actual people living there. And all of the boring things online.
I quite like that.
Town centres becoming more residential will definitely help. Plus, you are quite right about the difference between boy and girl shopping. However, the units that are empty are very big for cafés.
The Debenhams in my hometown is being turned into student accommodation for the university. Great wheeze, IMO.
That sounds great. There’s nobody else around for them to disturb.
Not without issues, though:
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/may/15/converting-shops-to-flats-could-lead-to-low-quality-homes
All well and good, @hedgepig, but that’s a pretty self-centred conclusion; your ‘boring things’ are someone else’s essentials.
But this is all about personal preferences, isn’t it? Your essentials are someone else’s boring things! My essentials might be someone else’s frivolous unnecessaries.
There are some retail experiences which translate to online, and some that don’t. The ones which don’t presumably therefore have a future on the high street: they just might not be of interest to everyone. People will always need clothes and, until it’s possible for them to arrive at your house to try on and return within minutes, clothes shops in town will continue to be a thing.
Genuine subsistence essentials (as opposed to “essentials”) will always have a physical presence, too.
Hmmm, well I happen to think that being able to buy a handful of M6 60mm Coach Screws in a bronze passivated finish is pretty much an essential subsistence must-have. Which is probably tangentially connected to the fact that I hardly ever spend anything in high street clothes shops. T-shirts from the supermarket and a pair of Craghoppers do me fine.
I generally don’t buy that often from high street chains either. Luckily my town has a couple of lovely non-chain clothes shops and three (count em: 3!) actual tailors, which stock real quality and do free alterations when you buy from them.
Online high street brands will do me when it comes to the more basic stuff: J Crew and Reiss for hoodies, t shirts etc. And I do buy from Mr Porter, but that stuff always ends up going to the tailor’s so it fits properly. Nothing worse than sleeves brushing your knuckles and trousers which crumple instead of breaking at your shoeline.
But then, I’m a bloke. Women’s high street fashion is much better at catering to an engaged, informed market, so choice and style is a lot easier to come by. Enjoying being well-dressed is one of those rare instances where being a man is actually a bit more expensive and inconvenient than being a woman.
(I’ve lost a huge amount of weight in recent years, and as my weight went down, my interest in good clothes went through the roof.)
Anyway, I think we’ll increasingly see little boutique fashion places and tailors in more high streets. I hope so, anyway.
Where I am is like that. Cafes, wine bars, little oddball shops and boutiques, no biggies other than Starbucks and Nero though the cognoscenti go to local Hatters cafe with the crazy Italian guys whose coffee is nearly a quid cheaper and twice as good. Proper hardware shop. Etc. A few too many charity shops and boarded up windows though, which I hope will come back. At the last local elections the Tories, who did precisely nothing for the town got booted out by a Labour/Lib Dem coalition who have made much more effort in the town centre commercially and environmentally and it’s starting to pay off. That alliance is stronger after last week so fingers crossed. Local leadership is really important.
Having been given a personal brief transit tour through the wild and dangerous streets chez Twang, I recognise the description of the same at least semi-bespoke shopping experience there that I can also find in the cobbled alleys of Bath, much nearer to Foxy Towers.
I sincerely hope that many others have access to the same quality of shopping experience, but I suspect that they will largely be those who live in or close to our smaller towns and larger villages.
What I find dismaying is the rash of ghastly replica shopping centres – either within cities or in out-of-town ‘retail parks’ (previously known as farmland) – that I see everywhere across the country these days. On a visit to my old home town in Devon a couple of years back, my neice was keen to take a look at the new mall that had opened that week in the centre of Plymouth; my brother and I acquiesced to her request, and off we trotted. God, how dispiriting it was. It could have been literally anywhere in England; the same brands, the same architecture, the same escalators, lifts, flooring, the same vacant faces pacing the place looking for an excuse to spend something on something, flummoxed by the size of the place, gormlessly swallowing someone else’s infernal consumption machine, as if they were lucky to have it. Modern Life Is Rubbish, it shouted.
You have failed to factor in the Hipster. The hipster is restoring exactly what you miss. And it’s massive.
Does that mean it’s a trend that will soon pass? Maybe, it will become mainstream.
Fold up bikes, ludicrous beards, extortionate woke granola….. Hip went the way of R & B.
RIP.
We don’t have hipsters in Hull, we have spice zombies.
…..waits for Geri Halliwell joke….
I lived in the centre of the town I grew up in and walked through it twice every day on the way to and from school (except when I was avoiding bullies). Indoor market, Woolworths, a record store, several newsagents, many cafes run by Italians. And we did have restaurants, 3 or 4 Fish n Chip shops and a couple of Chinese places (takeout only)You’ve never had it so good!
Apart from the indentikit Malls, Town Centres have largely become centres of Leisure – Wetherspoons, Costa, various eateries (always at least 1 Nandos, and probably 5 Greggs) stuffed between High Street survivors like Boots (a third the size now compared to when I were a lad), WHSmiths, Blackwells (if you’re lucky), M&S, and a regional John Lewis-type Department Store. And the rest of the space filled with Charity Shops, Betting Shops, or Anything For A Quid shops.
No wandering aimlessly anymore (no point, nothing to see here) – Get In, Get what you came for, Get out.
At least Reading is trying – there is one small arcade with a few independent shops (beer shop, cheese shop, Collectors Shop (aka Junk Shop), and – my favourite – an indie Record Shop.
Footfall might increase now the world is opening up – have you seen the queues (and lack of teeth) outside Primark? – but there is precious little reason to go into Town for a wander and to kill time, and sadly I’m not sure that’s going to change any time soon.
The Debenhams closing brought about cries of “that’s a shame” – I wonder how of those mourning it’s passing many actually went there before?
Build Back Better? I reckon it’s got a couple of years of loss-leading to get somewhere near – cut the rents may be the most likely way forward – that might encourage/enable smaller and/or local businesses to take a place on the High Street.
It’s not just the rent. Those ugly big department stores need a thorough redesign to make them attractive and more suitable for smaller businesses. That will take some investment.
Your examples are indeed a small beacon of hope – Bath is the same, with a wealth of little traders scattered amongst the small retail premises in the centre. Guitar shops for that 50’s Tele, Watchmakers to get grandads pocket watch going, posh outfitters for that black tie evening! Cobbled streets, trees, no cars, browsathontastic.
Head a few hundred yards south towards Bath Spa railway station however, and there’s a new ‘retail development’, built with some sympathy for the essential Georgian feel of the town it has to be said, but pretty much all of the individual business brands within it’s streets are just those that would, elsewhwere, be scattered throughout an out-of-town identikit mall. It’s the quirky, jammed-in, cramped little buildings in the older part of twon that are allowing the smaller artisans and trades-people to continue to trade in the city.
The ‘Nooks and Corners’ pages of Private Eye each issue are full of stories of planning nightmares where lovely old buildings, very often the homes of old retail businesses, are being plundered by greedy cash-strapped councils, greedy absentee landlords and the like for the purposes of building designer flats or yet another new shopping mall (to be filled with the usual suspects), in order for someone – who doesn’t live anywhere nearby – to pocket a tidy profit. Market forces are continuing their relentless drive towards giving everybody, everywhere a perfectly replicated Stepford shopping environment.
A high street that delights the visitor and provides the context for small, bespoke businesses to flourish should be our collective urban goal, but as has been said, profound things need to change before that can become a reality.
If it’s the place I’m thinking of that new bit in Bath is a massive improvement on the old grotty shopping area near the station. That was horrible.
Apologies if it’s not the bit I’m thinking of.
Exeter is an excellent example of how to do re-generation. When I lived/worked there in the early 2000s it was pretty grim aside from the Cathedral quadrant, what with depressing 60s/70s town planning and far too much emphasis on students/pissed up student nights. When I visited again a year prior to Covid I was amazed how it had transformed. The aforesaid grimness was gone with exactly the right touch of improvement, a wonderful variety of places to eat, good shops and an extremely nice vibe/ambience all round. Exeter is a delight, but keep it schtum, alright?
Good rugby team too. Never been there though
Take an umbrella if you do. I went there several times when I lived in nearby Taunton for a short while in the 90s and it always seemed to be raining, even when it wasn’t a few miles away.
As I said, it looks ok, in as much as it has some vaguely recognisable Georgian feel to it, but by Christ it’s stuffed full of the same old same old chain store shite you can find in any decent sized conurbation; there’s nothing there to tempt anyone in who’s looking for a quirky, original, unique shopping experience. It’s just a posh-looking identimall with weather. Even the buskers largely shun it.
I lived in Brighton in the 70s and early 80s, then London and Edinburgh in the rest of the 80s, the midlands in the mid to late 90s, and Glasgow for the first half of the noughties. Those fine places had excellent shopping with plenty of indie shops, shops for preloved items, and choice, with good pubs for refreshments and to meet friends in. Shopping now seems largely mediocre in comparison (though the quality of food has much improved). Malls give me panic attacks, so hateful are they to my vibe. If I discover a decent indie second hand bookshop when visiting somewhere, I will note it in my mental map; music is now easier to buy online (books too, if I am honest).
I don’t buy clothes – if I am in a fat phase, I wear my bigger clothes, if I’ve “lost a bit”, I wear my slightly less fat clothes. This cycle (plus the past year of not dressing formally, and inheriting my brother’s various jeans, fleeces, socks, and shreddies) means i don’t need to buy gear, either (and TBH, I prefer to wear something until it falls to bits).
The going-out shopping I still enjoy happens in street markets, car boots, and chazzas. Love buying exotic foodstuffs in multicultural bits of cities. Posh and designer shops bore me; why should I want to walk past Cartier or the Nike Store? But finding an Iranian grocers, or the nirvana of a new chazza with a music fan’s cleared out CDs, DVDs, and decent books (death? divorce? a shameful discovery about an artist? going totally digital?) and I’m in Heaven. Oh, and another call-out for Turkish barbers and wet shaves.
Oh, gosh, Brighton. One of the only large-ish towns in the SE of England that I’ve ever considered I could live in. The Lanes used to be an absolute joy. Have they still retained their charm I wonder, I haven’t been there for probably twenty years.
As an erstwhile near resident, of Lewes, from birth to twenty odd, I would say less, a little, as they have become a more upmarket tourist magnet. North Laine, mind, once just the very dodgy area at the back of the station, now gets better and better. (Last visit was 2019 and pre-pandemic. I should add.)
I don’t go that often but it’s mainly independent traders. a couple of guitar shops, Resident Music, Dave’s Comics, second hand clothes as well as new stuff you won’t find in The Churchill shopping centre. Generally quite good although I know one person who was disappointed, having not visited for years. Not sure what she was expecting really.
As a regular visitor to Resident (pre-pandemic of course) the North Laines are well worth a look. We were there on Tuesday, had the car serviced in Portslade and walked to Resident and back.
Some interesting shops in Hove and along Western Road but much better in the North Laine area. Nice 80s Japanese compilation in Resident.
As retropath2 has intimated, it’s likely North Laine that you’re thinking of, VV. The Lanes are the narrower thoroughfares to the west of North Street, with a ton of gold sellers and in previous years, some antiques, whilst North Laine is the bigger area to the east of North Street, with marvellous outlets like Snoopers Paradise, Resident Records, Jump The Gun, Komedia, Dave’s Comics etc etc. Yep, it’s still great.
Jump The Gun, incidentally is one of three Mod shops in Brighton. A new-ish one is to be found nearer The Lanes. Quadrophenia Alley is its name, and it is indeed on the edge of the ginnel where Jimmy and Steph had their hurried union.
*checks sat nav to see if we can fit in a quick browse on the way to Suffolk*
Dagnabbit, no, it’s too far out of our way. Must try to find an excuse to go back there one day.
Online is just so easy.
Last weekend I bought a glass ornament from a charity shop (one of the last few strengths of physical shops). It’s a round Sun, about six inches wide, and heavy with it, an inch or more deep and solid except for a thin hole in the top which could hold a single flower stem. When the cat brought some pigeon feathers in and hid them in my shoes, a favourite game of hers, I put them in the ornament where they looked quite striking.
Patience, best beloved, I do have a point and I’m getting to it.
Seeing how good the pigeon feathers looked I wondered how easy it would be to get some peacock feathers to brighten the effect. Very easy it turns out, from Amazon I could get 10 peacock feathers, a foot or so long, delivered to my door tomorrow for a few quid.
How can the high street compete with that level of speed, price and convenience?
I still like town centres but they are hit and miss. I go into Lichfield town centre and it has a pleasant vibe. Saturdays are market days and there is an excellent fruit and veg store. There is also a regular cd fair and plenty of good cafes, bars and restaurants. The experience is more a casual day out than a shopping expedition.
Birmingham is increasingly more pedestrianised these days and very much better for it. Personally I have a biased view that it is a great city centre.From 1st June they are introducing a clean air system and you will have to pay to enter a 4 mile radius of the central area if you are a dirty polluter.
Will be interesting to see if this reduces or increases footfall.
I keep seeing football when footfall is written. It is confusing me
The peacock feather store in my town has closed down 😉
A postscript. I’m just back from Hobbycraft on the edge of the town centre, which gave me a decent 3 mile round trip walk and a place to buy peacock feathers from a bricks and mortar store.
You know where has a good town centre?
York. Love going round there.
Be warned: on Saturdays the streets are thronged with terrifying hordes of marauding hen parties. See also: Durham. Women love getting pissed in towns with plenty of medieval architecture, it seems. Not terribly practical – cobbled streets do not favour heels.
I’ve found.
The drive from Cairngorms to Cambridge is arse-numbing, so we often stay overnight in a Premier Inn in Durham. A few years back it was a Saturday night and the hen party set off for town as we were having dinner. After lots of early-hours noise, they made breakfast but some looked distinctly peaky. Offspring the younger, then about 8 or 9, announced very loudly “if that’s what alcohol makes you look like, I’m never going to drink.”
We checked out quickly, before we got duffed up by a gang of hungover Geordie lasses.
If they were Geordies, they would have to be in a hotel, because they wouldn’t be from Durham.
Yeah, that’s what I meant (but didn’t say): they were Geordies on a hen night in Durham.
Well…. you just watch yerself, sonny.
York is top of the list for stag and hen outings from Teesside – easy train journey, so they get tanked up on the train journey before they even get to York. Tynesiders head for Durham – no idea why – it’s not like there’s a shortage of drinking establishments in Newcastle. I’ve seen the Quayside on a Saturday night.
Someone tried to run me over in their car outside the now defunct Cooperage, just along from the Quayside.
That was a Saturday night. Thus unremarkable behaviour.
You get the opportunity to intimidate innocent sober people on the train, which is part of the fun.
I don’t know if I’m condemning them or am just jealous.
I don’t know what the future holds – I live in a very small town which has pretty much no empty shops and functions really well for the community it serves. It has two (count ’em) butchers shops, a fruit n Veg place, florist, jewellers, newsagents, some gifty shops selling cards and gifts, some nice cafes, some decent old fashioned pubs, a craft beer Bar, an excellent chippy, a a nice Italian eaterie & pizza place and a ridiculously good Indian/Bangledeshi restaurant. There are some charity shops but No vape shops and the betting shop closed down during lockdown 1. If it had a Record Shop, a decent bakery and a fancy beer shop it would be damn near perfect. It’s not posh or hipster in the slightest but it seems to work well. There is definitely a future for small, local retail.
I’ve no affection for those drab out-of-town retail parks (surely nobody does?!) and so maybe it’s time those were razed to the ground and turned into public parks – put the big box retail back in to city centres. Clearly for this to work the whole system of Business rates needs a revamp – it favours an outdated model based on location and floorspace so effectively penalises bricks and mortar businesses from being in cities and gives a stupid advantage to digtal businesses with a small footprint or operating virtually
The ‘village’ where I live is similar to your town. Except, that it’s dominated by eateries and drinking holes to attract people who live elsewhere. Very successful too, until the rents go up. Then, there is quite a rotation of establishments. The family businesses that own their properties since the year dot are very stable.
Sadly, there seems no government appetite for business rates revamp. I don’t think there was anything in the Queen’s Speech.
There are “malls” in city centres, from my limited experience I have seen them in Leeds, Liverpool and Cardiff over there. I think the new ones are done pretty well, also with decent restaurants, cinemas etc and a roof to avoid the worst of the British weather.
In Canada most are in cities or very close, pretty necessary to avoid extreme cold or heat when shopping
And none of those irritating little independent shops – all the money going to the big boys where it belongs. Lovely!
They have small, independent shops too, they are just inside rather than outside. Of course chains dominate but they do in most high streets too. Walked down Oxford St lately?
Yes.
(Does 1984 count as ‘lately’?)
Only when I’ve remembered to bring my ventilator and the oxygen bottle.
Folkestone town centre is being hollowed out like everywhere else. Debenhams has closed, not that I ever went there except to gaze in wonder at the amazing Art Deco staircase. But as Bellows said up there it will be the hipsters (in the broadest possible sense) who save it.
Talking of bus passes (as Tigger did in the OP), the bus to Canterbury stops right outside my door, so I regularly take myself off there for the day when I’m in residence. It takes about an hour each way, but that’s why there are books. Canterbury has a proper town centre – the usual dispiriting selection of national high st shops, but also lots of bookshops and decent chazzas and plenty of good places for lunch, which can be as liquid as you like. And there’s the cathedral for spot of spiritual refreshment. Before the pandemic you had to hope to dodge the hordes of French school kids, but presumably that’s not an issue these days.
Only a couple more years to go.
Greedy landlords/astronomical rent landed a boot in the face of independent shops that we already vainly battling the online shopping Leviathan, as well as a tide of low quality brand chain crap.
I noticed we have a new “ethical” food store here. I would have investigated but they were closed at 5.15. Their hours are 9 – 5 so it will be interesting to see if that ain’t no way to make a living.
We have an ‘ethical’ food store, too, run by an active anti-vaxxer. He’d rather he, or his relatives or anybody else he can persuade, succumb to a natural virus than be protected by a man-made vaccine. How ethical is that I wonder?
This seems to more about reduced packaging and lower food miles.
That, plus ‘organic’, vegetarian produce.
I have no problem with his wares. The nuts are especially good. It’s just him.
I think you’ll find that vaccine is Woman-made. In 2012, biochemist Jennifer Doudna and her team at Berkeley figured out how to rewrite our genetic code using a system called CRISPR. Thanks to this miraculous discovery, we now have the power to hunt down cancer cells, deflect oncoming viruses, and cure genetic diseases.
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-next-big-idea/id1482067226?i=1000520420962
Quite right. Thanks for the correction.
@Mrbellows
“Woman-made”?
Surely you mean “person-who-mensturates-made”?
Depends. 😉
The Sainsburys in my town has outsourced its car park. You used to be able to nip in and out without buying a ticket. Not now as I found out after a £42 fine. I’m sure “signage was clearly displayed” as the letter states, but I wasn’t looking! It’s like they don’t want me to come back. If so, mission accomplished. Bah.
Assuming you were only in the store for say 15 minutes tops, write to APCOA or which ever bunch of theiving bastards it is that runs the car park, and tell them you drove in, sat in your car for 15 minutes discussing with your partner the Covid safety of using the supermarket, and then decided that you’d order online instead, whereupon you drove off again. Ask them how long you are allowed to stay in your vehicle whilst deliberating this point on their premises, and in particular, ask them to point out where it says exactly that on the fucking signage.
Except the person who ticketed them would have noticed the car was empty?
They stood at the payment station observing the numbers of people, how many were wearing masks and if they were predominately younger or older before making the decision to leave.
Exactly – something the bloody cameras cannot disprove.
I’ll bet there was no person doing the ticketing. It’s all done with ANPR systems these days. We’ve had, and won, our own battles with those bastards here.
Nice idea but it wa a big shop and took about an hour. Life’s too short. I’m just not shopping there again.
Oh god, life’s too short to spend an hour in any shop.
Apart from Selectadisc in 1989. *harp glissando*
I spent an hour in Nottingham Selectadisc in 1992, after a pub lunch somewhere near the castle. The offices of Barclaycard must have had my photo in their “Customer of the month” display afterwards.
There was the main shop, the second-hand and/or fenced goods shop next door and the 12″s shop down the road. I was up and down Market Street trying to stretch me twenty quid of birthday money like an optimistic sailor on shore leave.
You mean there was a craze for sea shanties then as well?
Yes. And I forgot to mention that I’d already spent that twenty quid getting as far inland as Nottingham.
June Tabor frightens me. In that image she’s just successfully told a Russian invasion fleet to do one.
I just dont know how independents survive. My partner ran a little cafe in a village. Lovely landlord, cheap rent and power. Low footfall meant long hours, wasted food and just about breaking even So we looked in the nearest big town. The rents, rates etc were mind blowing. Add staff to handle the bigger footfall and we worked out that working twice as hard serving 10 times more people we’d be worse off than in the village. So defeated she packed up her dream and went back to work on an office. I hope the greedy landlords, unhelpful councils and picky customers who prefer Costa enjoy what they’ve created. Such a shame as the will is there but you can’t live on thin air…
“Footfall” again? On that note, well done Leicester City!
Schmeichel’s save then… Best since Jim Montgomery
What I thought. Wanted Rodgers to run in an ungainly way across the turf to hug him at the final whistle.
While I wanted Leicester to win, I thought the officials’ decision to wheel out VAR after the Chelski “goal” was ridiculous.
I disagree. It was definitely offside. The commentators kept referring to millimetres but it looked offside to me before they drew the lines on. It was the correct decision.
(I’m not a Leicester fan.)
I really hate VAR because it means that the crowd don’t what they’ve seen until they’ve been told what they’ve see, so if ever there was an argument in its favour it would have been 2020/21 when there were no crowds. It still ruins the game.
That said the 90th minute of yesterday’s game was very, very funny.
I shouted “That was offside!” I was right. VAR proved me right. Still, VAR is the worst thing that has ever happened to football.
Worse than the racism, the greed of oligarchs, the riots in the seventies and eighties and the deaths due to squashing too many people into small spaces….?
Worse than Robbie Savage’s hair?
I’m in no position to judge. Just jealous of anyone who has hair. If I had it, I’d flaunt it.
Not having hair means you’re spared making a lot of potentially very bad decisions.
@Tiggerlion
Yes, yes, the racism, the greed of oligarchs, the riots in the seventies and eighties and the deaths due to squashing too many people into small spaces all speak for themselves. But aside from that…
Yup. Worse than all of them. Pretending that the technology actually works ie can tell exactly where a player was when the ball was kicked and then leave this decision to some twat in a bunker and the crowd have no idea what’s going on and…. definitely worst thing ever
How about a clearly offside goal (visible to the naked eye) leading to extra time, penalties and a Chelsea win? Wouldn’t that have been worse?
Why ridiculous? What decision did you expect? Nothing was “wheeled out”, every “goal” is checked and he was clearly offside. This wasn’t one of those where his torso was possibly 1mm ahead of the defender’s arse.
Not listening you are, Dai. He was offside, not by much but offside. VAR was right, the ref/linesman was Wrong. But VAR in football is even Wronger.
And yes, Riggs – in a proper and sane world the goal would have stood and there’s every chance Chelsea (god, how I hate Chelsea) would have won the cup.
At its best, football is drama, is life. And guess what, life is full of mistakes and injustices. VAR is evil.
How do you know the linesman ‘missed’ it? He might have thought it looked offside but was happy to allow VAR to check the goal, ensuring that the correct decision was made.
Clearing the matter up didn’t take up much time, added to the drama of the last few minutes of the match and, most importantly, the match had the right result.
In this era of brutal social media comment, match officials are relieved of a lot of the abuse and death threats to which they were regularly subjected pre VAR.
You see nothing Wrong with the linesman thinking “I’ll leave that to VAR”?
No. I don’t. They are instructed not to raise the flag until after the play has resolved, in case it was onside all along. I don’t blame the linesman at all.
VAR is resulting in the correct decision being made far more frequently. Nothing is 100% perfect.
When was the last time you saw a top rank footballer put his hand up and say, “yeah, I handled it deliberately,” or, “no, he didn’t touch me.”?*There is now so much at stake, football is super professional and going to ground clutching your face is regarded as the professional thing to do. The absence of crowds has highlighted how much screaming they do.
All this might be acceptable if deranged fans weren’t inclined to track down referees and threaten to kill them and their families because they were hoodwinked by play-acting players.
* Robbie Fowler v Everton overturned a penalty decision in the eighties. By contrast, that gentleman of silky skills, Thierry Henry, was unable to tell the ref he’d controlled the ball with his hand to enable France to qualify at the expense of Ireland.
You missed my point once again
Me? Missed a point? Never!
As for you Mr Lion – defending VAR because it saves referees’ lives??? If we were sure the technology is 100% foolproof then we could do away with officials altogether, just let the computer decide. Then like American Football the games are approximately 4328 days long. The only 100% guarantee is goal line technology – “was it over or not?”. All the rest is guesswork because unless you have 4328 cameras following every move and, for instance, calculating where Player A was when Player B kicked the ball then it’s all bollox. And it sucks the life out the game and therefore Life and therefore Everything
It’s interesting that you choose to compare to American Football, a sport that always had oodles of officials and play breaks, and not Rugby or Cricket, which has been using VAR in this country without much complaint or delay for decades.
I support VAR because it enables the referees to reach the correct conclusion far more often. The ‘time consuming’ argument doesn’t seem to have played out in real life. I can’t recall a Football match lasting thousands of days. I think you’ve forgotten to factor in the savings in players surrounding the ref and arguing the toss. Once VAR has decided, everyone knows the discussion is over.
Yesterday’s decision, for example, saved at least an hour of messing about, extending a poor game to well beyond the last train home.
VAR and Cricket works fine. They were made for each other. VAR is close to ruining rugby and is actually ruining football. As the latest Super League nonsense proved, football is all about actual fans inside an actual stadium. You ever been at a game where a goal is scored, you all jump up and down and then the big screen flashes “We’re looking at it from twenty different angles, none of which are “real” and we’ll get back to you in a few minutes. In the meantime take a few moments to ponder where it all went Wrong”?
I’ve been going to Rugby League matches since I was 4 and Football since I was 6 up to Covid. Rugby League has never been better and covid has resulted in rule changes that have made the game even faster. As for Football, the thing that annoys and frustrates me the most is players screaming and feigning serious injury when barely touched. VAR strikes me as taking a lot of heat out of the game, improving it immeasurably in my view.
Fair enough. (I’ll bet you like jazz though).
The average VAR review time is 20 seconds not ” a few minutes”. It’s ensuring more correct decisions. If anything is sucking the life out of the game it’s the cheats, and VAR is making their life more difficult.
Football has been miserably slow to adopt change. It’s plain bonkers to have the same 3 officials (only 2 in any one half of the pitch) as the game originated with. You’d think that by now it would make sense to have the whole touchline on both sides manned, or maybe have extra officials to deal with the shenanigans at corners or dead balls, but no, jumpers for goal posts, Dixie Dean will be turning in his grave …[wanders off]
I think the Europa League once experimented with penalty area officials, one at each end, obviously. It didn’t really help. They still were unsure about ‘contact’. Never fear, VAR is here instead.
I had bowed out of this debate realising Tigger and I were never going to agree but I can’t let fortuneight’s comment re “additional” officials slip by. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!
How very odd. Why would you prefer games that turned on incorrect decisions if you didn’t have to?
The Afterword circa 1895 – I’m not down with these new fangled X rays. Robs the old sawbones of his true value. And jeez, does it slow down the treatment or what? Just open me up, let them have a poke around. They usually get it more or less right.
Officials don’t ‘wheel out’ VAR. A VAR check is done automatically when a goal is scored. The referee onfield has no power to invoke VAR or not as he sees fit.
I’m not normally a fan of VAR, but I’ll make an exception in this case as it went against Chelsea.
“greedy landlords, unhelpful councils and picky customers” is pretty good, but I’d be tempted to change the final adjective to ‘brainwashed’. The public wants what the public gets, remember?
I like shopping for Christmas presents. I make a point of making a day for myself. I get myself groomed up to the nines. I even waft a bit of cologne around my neck. (Super hint here, the ladies don’t quite know why they are drawn to you) and then I head downtown. I love the anticipation, the excitement of everyone else around doing what I’m doing. Shopping for Christmas presents. Then I’ll treat myself to a fancy lunch. I’ll enjoy that too because I get to people watch. So much joy in the room.
I’ve still got at least two presents to get and a little panic might quicken my step until I remember the new age shop I had dismissed earlier. Bonsai!!
I think you’ve just described a passage from my worst nightmare. I don’t mind the atmosphere of a town centre in December but actually going into shops at that time of the year I find generally awful.
Discernment is a discipline worth cultivating. Merry Christmas!
In general, isn’t there a greater variety of higher quality goods available then ever before? When my wife’s family came here from India in the mid-seventies, they lived in a small town where they were the only Asian family. If they wanted any spices they had to drive 60 miles to Newcastle. By the mid-nineties, they could buy anything like that locally, due to the arrival of Sainsburys. And I think for all of the nostalgia for small business, the chains have been a big part of the transformation of tastes and availability. The whole coffee culture in Britain really arrived with Starbucks. This led to other chains being set up, like Costa, but also meant a boom in the market for independent cafes – the number of independents is roughly equal to that of the chain outlets. Where I grew up, the bookshop consisted of a few shelves in the local stationers. They now have a Waterstones, and last time I was there, a specialist dealer in second hand books and prints.
I don’t doubt that some town centres are suffering declines, with the decline of public transport in many areas being a big factor. I live in North London and along the local main street, there are most of the shops you could want within about a fifteen minute walk: stationer, book shop, numerous cafes, branches of the main supermarkets, a Lebanese/Mediterranean food store, jewellers, music shop, two fruit and vegetable stalls, butcher, fish shop, hardware stores and more. I think the fact that it has very good bus, tube and train links must help to keep it thriving.
Starbucks make terrible coffee. Coffee culture arrived decades before them, in my smallish Welsh valleys town we had about 5 cafes all run by Italian immigrants and they served proper coffee. Think all but one gone now. Starbucks may have been the instigator for the recent vastly overpriced stuff though.
Agree with your other points though. I live in the suburbs with dreaded “strip malls” which are loved in Canada. However I have a large supermarket, a pharmacy, dry cleaners, dentist’s, doctors etc and about 10 varied restaurants/pubs all within about 10 minutes walking distance. Not as quaint as a nice British high street but useful.
Oh, there’s a Starbucks too. Used to be two of them
I read a good book about this which I’d recommend. It periodically comes up on the 99p deals which is where I got it.
But Zac Goldsmith as the bait????
Whe I was a kid, local shops were a bit shit. Going into the local town centre lead to claims of 50% of shops were shoes shops or jewellry shops. Which was broadly accurate. Even with my rose tinted spectacles (and opticians were a close third to shoes and earrings), it was a bit shit.
I now think I have more options – a proper town centre shop – Reading, Guildford and Richmond are all within 30 or so minutes. Big mall trip? Westfields in White City is doable. Potter around looking for clothes and things? TK Maxx and Homesense are nearby with free parking. Big shop? Costco is great. Modern supermarkets are really very good. And now they have realised the mega sized stores are too big, they are opening more local stores. Still have a busy local hardware store, shoe repairer and bike sho (which has opened a second branch 3 shops down).
No record shops though. Although I did see vinyl in Sainsburys a couple of years ago. But I don’t buy records and CDs now.
I reckon the high street has always been duff. It still is. But shopping is better than it was.
Sounds like you live somewhere near me @Leedsboy . As you say, Reading, Guildford and Richmond aren’t bad, and although Kingston should possibly be on that list it isn’t quite what it was. Costco overall is a bit of a dispiriting experience I find, but some of the food they sell is actually of a very good quality indeed.
I live on the Blackbushe city limits. Costco food is, by and large, excellent. The maple syrup is a bargain.
With you completely on the free parking, Tiggs.
Hammer illegal street parking by all means, but plenty of free parking in or near town centres can only be a good thing.