ROBERT HARDMAN: Why all of us share blame for ‘zombie’ excessive streets

The Covid-era ‘Keep Your Distance’ stickers are nonetheless glued to the walkway however that’s the solely reminder of what as soon as stood past these brick partitions and sealed-up doorways: the holy grail of retail gentrification – an enormous fats Waitrose.

However, in 2020, post-lockdown, the doorways closed, the hoardings went up and the constructing has stood empty ever since. Waitrose owns the lease till 2026. It’s simply cheaper to maintain it closed than run it at a loss.

At the opposite finish of the mall – and of the retail spectrum – there additionally was once a Wilko. Except that shut final 12 months. It has, a minimum of, been taken over by a One Beyond low cost retailer.

In the colonnade which runs between these two massive retail models, half a dozen smaller retailers are clinging on, helped in no small half by the county council’s choice to supply free spots within the adjoining automotive park.

This is the scene on one aspect of the excessive avenue of the once-bustling Hampshire city of Waterlooville. It takes its identify from the ‘Heroes of Waterloo’ pub, constructed within the Nineteenth century on the crossroads of the London-Portsmouth highway and east-west site visitors alongside the south coast. A hoop highway and the A3 have lengthy since bypassed the city centre which is now a pedestrian precinct.

The image is much more bleak on the opposite aspect of the excessive avenue. There I discover one thing known as Wellington Way. It’s not a lot a shopping center as a movie set ready for a dystopian zombie drama, or a demolition ball. Almost every thing is stripped out or boarded up.

Aside from one charity store, it has nothing to lure folks down its two unprepossessing walkways so, unsurprisingly, they don’t hassle. There is an Iceland on the far finish with its personal automotive park past. Most prospects are available from there.

The mall is adorned with light murals of early Nineteenth-century troopers overlooking a George III-era cannon with a plate saying it’s ‘on loan from the Royal Armouries’. Concrete cannon balls formed as seats are occupied by nobody. Yet all this was inbuilt 1966, its empty two-storey buildings an ideal homage to the banality and ugliness of Sixties municipal vernacular design.

In January, a brief video of this joyless dump appeared on social media, courtesy of a girl who grew up within the city and had returned to go to her mother and father. ‘Look at it!’ she exclaims, scanning the digicam across the buying haunts of her youth. ‘There’s simply bloody nothing right here!’ The clip has ‘gone viral’, as they are saying, and been considered almost three million instances, prompting yet one more debate about the way forward for our city centres. The website, we’re informed, has lately been acquired by an proprietor who’s promising new retailers with flats above. No one is holding their breath.

Many commentators wag the finger of blame on the Tories or the council (or each, since it’s a Tory council). With Britain formally in (a technical) recession, and the Budget and each native and common elections in prospect, what higher time to look once more at that seemingly incurable affected person – the British High Street?

What makes Waterlooville each fascinating but unexceptional is that this isn’t a ‘forgotten’ space of power deprivation, crying out for state intervention. I anticipate most individuals will know someplace related.

We can not pin this dismal scene on the closure of steelworks or the mines or that previous Leftie catch-all – ‘Thatcher’. This sits alongside a number of the most affluent actual property within the nation, not least Hampshire’s Meon Valley and the South Downs round Petersfield. When the closure of Waitrose was introduced, one anguished shopper wailed to the Portsmouth News that there was nowhere else within the space to purchase ‘pickled lemons and different types of corn-fed chicken’. No violins performed.

There is an Asda on the outskirts and it is just a ten-minute stroll from the excessive avenue to a retail park down the hill beneath the city the place a Sainsbury’s megastore and an M&S are buzzing. Indeed, the recognition of this retail park is such that locals complain it will probably take an hour simply to get out of the place at peak instances on account of a wonky site visitors structure.

Everyone has their very own proposal for rejuvenating the city centre – be it a wall-climbing centre or a household butcher. But additionally they acknowledge, albeit grudgingly, that the principle accountability for the decline of the centre of Waterlooville – and all over the place else prefer it – rests with us all.

If we more and more need to store on-line, and we do, then we’re going to have to just accept that we should transform our city centres, or else see them shrivel.

‘Those people who mourned the loss of high street names like Woolworths, were usually the same ones who nailed the lid on the coffin,’ says the veteran retail analyst, Richard Hyman. ‘Over the last 20 years, we have seen the way in which 40 per cent of non-food retail has moved to the internet. Yet we have seen nothing like a corresponding 40 per cent reduction in the number of high street shops. That means that while some are learning to run much faster, others are going to go and there are more closures still to come.’ And they’ll’t all be became nail bars, quick meals joints or these curiously empty barber retailers.

Walking round Waterlooville, it’s clear all just isn’t misplaced. The obligatory Wetherspoons is ticking alongside and there are many premises that are something however zombie-like, often due to the efforts of their enterprising occupants.

Take the Little Bay Eatery on the excessive avenue. It opened a 12 months in the past after Melanie Humphreys and her co-owner, Peter Exton, determined that there was nonetheless demand for excessive avenue assembly level with good meals. ‘I must admit that I was scared at the time but I knew people like to go out for a coffee and meet up,’ she says. ‘And we now have a very strong regular crowd. Some lunchtimes, we’re having to show folks away.’ The three hours of free parking behind the previous Waitrose is essential, she says. That means, for instance, the weekly knitting membership which meets within the library will adjourn for a espresso right here.

Next door, Waterlooville Fruit & Veg has a riot of color on its cabinets plus loads of native sauces and chutney from locations such because the Isle of Wight. Andrew Price, 52, has been a greengrocer right here for greater than twenty years and says that there are nonetheless simply sufficient individuals who need recent produce which lasts longer than the shrink-wrapped grocery store stuff. ‘But unless there are some significant incentives to encourage business back into the high street, it’s going to be troublesome,’ he says. ‘It’s not simply web buying. Covid has obtained everybody extra on-line now. Internet banking means folks don’t come into the financial institution anymore.’ The city has seen one thing of a banking exodus currently, whereas Lloyds, HSBC and Halifax are hanging on.

‘We’d like to see one other massive identify on this website,’ says Chris Jenkins, proprietor of Celebration, an impartial card and reward store alongside the shell of the previous Waitrose. He says that this a part of city was thriving till the 2020 lockdown after which Waitrose pulled out. Raised in a household newsagents’ store, he has been a Hampshire retailer for 42 years. With extra selection than the massive card chains, he has vary of inventory, a loyal following and enterprise is brisk whereas we discuss, once more buoyed by the free parking outdoors. Several consumers inform me that, with out that, they wouldn’t hassle. But Mr Jenkins says the present state of affairs – with hire of £1,000 per week and a £1,300 quarterly service cost on high of £400-a-week enterprise charges – just isn’t sustainable.

High avenue florist Martin Lawley has no quarrel with the web since most of his enterprise comes that means. He tells me that what the realm wants is extra impartial retailers like him. ‘Let’s see a shoe store or a sports activities store. Right now it feels uncared for and that results in a unfavorable perspective.’

No one is anticipating handouts or a magic wand, be it from the council or Whitehall. Nor does anybody blame the likes of Waitrose for pulling out if they’ll’t make a revenue. There is just an more and more urgent want for some kind of reboot.

The native council is effectively conscious of the power of feeling. In January, it opened up a disused store for a ‘festival of ideas’ the place everybody may drop in to supply them. A crew of city planners has gone away to distill them. ‘There are new government schemes we will apply to but you can’t go to authorities with out a plan,’ says councillor Gwen Robinson, deputy chief and the cupboard lead on housing and communities. ‘I don’t consider the excessive avenue is useless but it surely wants neighborhood areas. There is simply a lot a council can do when you have got absentee landlords like pension funds who don’t have any affiliation with the realm.’ Does she see a future for the city centre with out a Waitrose-style core tenant? ‘Yes I do. You can’t simply throw within the towel,’ she insists, including that she is especially within the concept of an indoor market.

That is definitely standard amongst these I meet on the street. There can also be a eager urge for food to see extra housing within the city, relatively than see yet one more chunk of neighbouring farmland turned over to new housing, just like the huge new improvement of 5,000 houses which has simply opened down the highway at Berewood. That could imply one other 20,000 residents however they’re not in strolling distance of the city so that they’ll be straight of their vehicles and off to the retail park. Some may by no means set foot within the city centre from one month to the subsequent.

‘Of course we need a radical rethink and that should include converting a lot of these shops into flats,’ says retired lecturer Carol Legg, among the many trickle of consumers on the excessive avenue immediately. She factors throughout to what was once a big cinema and performance corridor known as the Curzon Rooms. It’s now been bulldozed to make means for a carpark. This boasts loads of empty areas because it doesn’t provide free parking (just like the one not far away) and has a beady-eyed warden ready to pounce with a ticket. How on earth was this allowed to occur? You may hardly devise a greater means of detering city centre footfall than by bulldozing a leisure amenity as a way to create a carpark for individuals who thus have one much less cause for coming within the first place.

I discuss to a number of veterans of the native enterprise scene. The largest native employer was once the Wadham Stringer automotive dealership, till it was taken over within the early Nineteen Eighties. Retired ex-boss Michael Stringer, who lives a few miles down the highway, fondly remembers the times when the city was a hive of exercise. He admits he seldom ventures there immediately however displays that ‘change is always a challenge’. Guy Singleton used to run a thriving laptop enterprise on the town however says his turnover dropped by 60 per cent when the council shut the automotive park to accommodate the equipment to construct the Waitrose website. He closed down in 2004 and went into the constructing commerce.

Local electrician Michael Jackson and his spouse Janet, a nurse for 40 years, have spent their lives right here. The household’s brightly painted store was all the time the go-to place for electrical provides till the web made that unviable. Yet the contracting aspect of the enterprise continues below son Peter. ‘We still work out of the same premises because we want to keep a presence in the town. But we’d prefer to construct a flat there, too,’ says Michael. The planning course of, he says, doesn’t make it straightforward.

Janet reveals me her archive of native cuttings and magazines. They embrace photos of cadet parades and carnivals; of the times when celebrities equivalent to motorcyclist Eddie Kidd or boxer Henry Cooper would draw crowds for the opening of a brand new showroom or Rotary Club fundraiser. They present a city with a soul and spirit which now appears sadly missing. But she is a realist and an optimist. ‘We can’t simply bellyache about the way in which issues have been. We must look ahead and get on with it.’

So what to do? One overarching message for each native and nationwide authorities is that it needs to be simpler to transform retail to residential, if you need people as a substitute of zombies in your city centres.

And for the remainder of us? Use it or lose it.