‘We didn‘t redefine a high street fit for 21st century’
‘We didn‘t redefine a high street fit for 21st century’
Author : Jonathan Charles
Date : Wednesday, 14 December 2011
Speaking about the completion of her David Cameron commissioned 28-point plan to save the high street, retail guru Mary Portas said that unless urgent action is taken “to create new magnets on the high street which aren’t just based on shopping” then “I honestly don’t believe we will have high streets in the future”.
She warned that although 25,000 shops have already disappeared from British high streets over the last ten years, thousands more will have to go in order to provide destinations which match today’s needs and lifestyles. It is not a question of trying to compete head on with out-of-town shopping centres supermarkets and the web, she believes, but instead there is a need to create an entirely new town-centre experience.
In a digital interview with The Daily Telegraph she explained what has “gone wrong”. ‘We didn’t redefine a high street fit for 21st century,” she said, and as a consequence the high street no longer provides what people want. “The consumer moved elsewhere, business moved elsewhere, we had out of town planning, we created hypermarkets, we created shopping malls and then online came along, and all of them very sophisticated actually in understanding what consumers needed and the poor old high street kind of struggled to keep up. Didn’t have a vision and didn’t adapt and now it needs to adapt or honestly I don’t believe we will have high streets in the future.”
A key recommendation contained within the review is for a new business model to be developed for the high street, bringing in non-retail services, such as gyms, creches and doctors surgeries, to create footfall and lead to the formation of shops relevant to those activities. Red tape restricting usage of business premises, the provision of free town-centre parking and event initiatives such as market days and helping and encouraging fledging retail businesses to open market stalls to trial new products, also form key areas of her review.
Mary Portas, who presents TV’s Mary Queen of Shops and Secret Shopper, was commissioned by David Cameron in May to compile a report on high-street shopping. The Prime Minister said at the time that high streets had become more "vibrant and diverse" in order to prosper.
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