In Christmas films, a festive trip to the shops is a magical experience. Cheerful shoppers bustle down snowy streets, to reach the light and warmth of department stores packed with alluring presents. Convincingly real Santas dandle happy children on their knees, next to perfectly dressed trees. Christmas is a commercial business, sure, but it’s also bright and fun.
That, though, is a fantasy American past, not the real British present, and a trip to most British high streets this Christmas is likely to present a rather different experience. Half-hearted light displays in concrete post-war shopping precincts. Soggy, grumpy people grumbling their way past derelict retail units and the boarded up ruins that once housed a Debenhams. The shops that are open are disproportionately likely to be vape suppliers, nail bars and other things suspiciously in favour among money launderers.
This might not be true of everywhere but it is true of rather a lot of places, and this year may be the hardest Christmas yet. Retailers have historically relied upon December takings to make up for poor revenues earlier in the year. But polling by More In Common, commissioned by think tank Power to Change, found that, while 37 per cent of people normally do their shopping in their local town centre, it now declines to a quarter around Christmas. Although elaborate Christmas displays in department stores once attracted crowds each December, this year just 7 per cent of people this year said they planned to do their shopping in one; 44 per cent planned to do it online. “It seems that even Christmas cannot save
the department store,” the report concluded grimly.
Explanations for this inexorable decline are as common as American candy stores on Oxford Street, and it’s hard to escape the suspicion that what’s ruined British retail is something akin to a perfect storm. Out-of-town shopping centres have been hitting traditional high streets for decades, while cuts have left councils less able to engage in placemaking than they once were. Then there’s the import of Black Friday, a post-Thanksgiving sale that now traditional British retailers feel compelled to engage in. We don’t even celebrate Thanksgiving! Now, Christmas is left sandwiched between two sales seasons. Who in their right mind is going to do their shopping then?
The single biggest factor, though, is perhaps the pandemic. It didn’t merely deal a blow to many physical retailers, from which most didn’t recover from: it also forced many shoppers to pick up an online shopping habit that has proved hard to break. Throw in high property prices and the general sense of economic malaise, and the result is retail is struggling, and that Britain simply has far more space for it than it needs.
At least part of the blame must lie with property owners determined not to look reality in the face. A shop left empty may be bringing in no cash – but it can still appear as an asset with a notional value, while its owner hangs on for better times. Rent it out for the price the market is able to pay, and you have to accept its actual value. The cost of improving public spaces could be ruining private balance sheets.
Fretful reports about the death of the high street, though, have become as big a part of the British Christmas as Wham!. A House of Lords enquiry made some suggestions about how to improve things. It proposed that towns should “look beyond retail” to reverse the decline, creating mixed use spaces with more bars and restaurants and more residential property, as well as public services like health centres and libraries. All this would increase footfall for those shops that remain. It made other suggestions, too, including boosting public toilet provision, prioritising local markets, and better lighting to make places feel safer.
All promising ideas, and Power to Change’s report lists a number of projects turning disused department stores into public service centre or community hubs. But it’s far from clear, with councils stretched as they are, who is in a position to make many of these changes. On top of that is that it’s hard to imagine the public weaning themselves off the value, choice or convenience offered by online shopping. It’ll take more than a Christmas miracle to resurrect the British high street.
[See also: Anthony Burgess’s Napoleon complex]
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