POOLE, England — Hope Dean is loyal to Poole, her hometown in
southwest
Britain, but she acknowledges that its shopping district has often
been a source of embarrassment.
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Just a few miles from the most expensive coastal real estate in the
country, Poole’s main shopping street is a tired mix of video game shops,
coffee shops, small chain stores and lots of markets selling secondhand items
that have attracted a dwindling number of shoppers.
Perhaps the worst section over the years was Kingland Crescent,
a forgotten stretch tucked under the shadow of a shopping center, described by
Dean as “the street that everyone would avoid.”
Now Dean, a 27-year-old former events manager, owns a snug plant
store on that same street. Her business, called Wild Roots, is bright and
colorful with shelves and tables piled high with plants, pots, cushions and
books. A large bird of paradise plant catches the light from the window at the
entrance.
Nearly a decade ago, a government-ordered review found that
Britain’s so-called high streets — the retail bedrocks of the country’s town
and city centers, comparable to America’s main streets — had reached a “crisis
point.” Since then things have only gotten worse, as lockdowns and a surge in
online shopping over the last year in response to
the pandemic have accelerated
the downward spiral of brick-and-mortar retailing. In 2020, a record number of
shops closed.
To rescue high streets, an unlikely combination of vested
interests are coming together. Giant asset managers and landlords are taking
risks to revive their downtrodden investments, shoppers and businesses are
reappearing from the pandemic newly interested in their local areas, and town
officials are ready to spend heavily to spread confidence.
Enough confidence for Dean, and others, to bet their livelihoods
on the high streets’ revival.
Wild Roots is one of 10 recently opened businesses on Kingland
Crescent that are operating rent-free as part of a redevelopment project by the
property’s owner, the giant London-based asset manager Legal & General
Investment Management, a unit of the country’s largest corporate pension
manager with more than 1 trillion pounds in assets. For two years, the
businesses do not have to pay rent or a type of local property tax known as business
rates.
“Poole really needs this,” said Dean, who decided to pursue her
love of greenery after being laid off from her events manager job in the first
six months of the pandemic. The property had been empty for six years. She was
handed the shop’s keys in December.
She hopes renovations to the area will make Poole’s town center
a destination.
“I just want it to be a place where people will come for their
weekends again,” she said.
Britain is facing urgent questions about what will happen to its
retail spaces as the value of commercial real estate tumbles. National retail
chains have collapsed, and stores have been boarded up and their contents sold
to online retailers. By some estimates, Britain has 40 percent more retail
space than it actually needs.
Retail sales jumped 9 percent in April as
lockdowns eased and
people rushed back to their favorite stores. But experts do not expect this to
last. They point to the need for deeper change.
Local officials, landlords and developers are betting that the
future of downtown shopping districts lies in their past, when they were “the
beating heart of most cities,” said Philip Broadhead, an elected member of the
local governing council and the head of the area’s economic redevelopment
efforts. High streets were once filled with small, independent businesses,
including butchers, tailors, drugstores and services like insurers, travel
agents and accountants. They were not completely given over to retailing.
To be sure, efforts to make high streets about more than just
shopping have been attempted for years. What is different now, many say, is the
attentiveness of locals: Pandemic lockdowns have forced people to stay close
and reconnect with their towns.
The pandemic has “shaken government, local government and people
out of complacency,” said Mark Robinson, the chairman of the High Streets Task
Force, a body set up by the government. “If you don’t invest, if you do not
care, if you do not shop, if you do not use it, you will lose it.”
It seems Legal & General Investment Management, with 3.5
billion pounds ($4.9 billion) in retail properties across Britain, has come to
this realization. In 2013 it paid nearly 60 million pounds for a 1960s-era
shopping center in Poole that represented more than half of the town’s retail
space, with an announcement promising “resilient income returns” for investors.
But some of the stores — including the one now occupied by Dean’s plants store
— stood empty for years.
It is now promoting its retail properties by focusing more on
community events and local businesses as opposed to national chains. It has
also announced a new leasing model that includes tenancies as short as three
months and many more contracts with rents based on the company’s earnings,
known as turnover leases. Other major landlords, including Hammerson and
LandSec, have also introduced new leasing plans.
And then there are the new shopkeepers on Kingland Crescent.
Besides Wild Roots, these include a packaging-free grocery store, a coffee
roastery, a seafood store, a shop selling ethically made fragrances, and a
design studio. They all opened in the past six months.
“For the first time in our generation we had the opportunity to
press refresh with our environments,” said Denizer Ibrahim, who is leading the
retail strategy at L&G. Part of the strategy is, in fact, moving beyond
retailing: In the Poole shopping center, for example, it is planning to turn a
corridor with about a dozen vacant spots into an adult learning center run by
the local council, offering classes as varied as information technology and
math, and beauty and hairdressing.
It will take more than enthusiasm, of which there is plenty, to
restore Britain’s high streets. Speed and huge investments will be needed to
complete these projects after years of failed regeneration. To help, the
government has set aside 1 billion pounds for a “Future High Streets Fund” and
a further 8 billion pounds in other town center-focused funds.
Broadhead, confident and sharply dressed, is among a new breed
of high-spending Conservatives governing Britain, led by Prime Minister Boris
Johnson. His council is planning to borrow 50 million pounds to finance
redevelopment projects, and he argues that councils, which are chronically short
of cash, should be allowed to borrow more and not have to rely on government
grants.
On high streets, the post-pandemic rebound “has been absolutely
tremendous,” he said. “That will only last if people want to be there.”
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