The retail “spot” and the retail “line”

Not sure if this is a good title for this, but talking of mixture, and related to our meeting discussion about adaptive centres, it is interesting to see the combination of a modern shopping complex working “together” with the high street in several suburban centres such as:

High Barnet – The Spires

Bromley – The Glades

Kingston – Bentalls Shopping Centre

It doesn’t look like a conflict, but maybe even a more accessible (and easy to perceive) form of shopping experience, having a dense point (shopping complex) and a strolling line (high street) together. Obviously these examples above are in quite prominent sub-centres, which are able to accommodate such complexes and provide them with services and customers.

Finding out how they “work together” or create “mutual harm” for each other could be interesting. The internal layout of the complex itself, i.e. “does it act as an alternative route between locations of traditional importance? How does it orientate people to perceive the high street?” could be points to look at.

 

Suburbs of South East London

Just to report that Ozlem and I went on a field trip to a selection of SE suburbs yesterday. Our route was: Orpington – Petts Wood – Bromley and Beckenham. We had intended to tak in Syndenham too but the bad weather meant our train failed to stop there. We also ran out of time to make it to Forest Hill but as we are both familiar with it anyway we can revisit at a later stage if necessary.

Orpington was interesting – a very long traditional high street approximately fifteen minutes from the overground route and running south north combining a large number of parades of shops, generally dating from the early decades of twentieth century it seemed. There is also a 60s or 70s shopping precinct called Walnets, rather ugly and run-down. There is a Sainsbury’s there now and was not empty on a Thursday afternoon but you would probably not want to hang arond there later on. There were the usual suburban chains such as Jenny’s and Threshers – also a large Marks and Spencers, but also a number of independent shops that looked like they were doing well enough. At the northern end of the High Street there were quite a lot of empty units and a nice looking pub that were empty and boarded up. This was rather incongruous as that end of the town was evidently originally Orpington village with some rather nice eighteenth or early nineteenth-century residences and acceptable pubs. This suggests an area going through a period of transition. Further north, beyond the High Street there were office buildings and appartments built onto the main road. Generally speaking the High Street was surrounded on all sides by classic interwar suburban semis – some quite smart. It reminded me, in some respects of Borehamwood, in being a suburban ‘town’ – though with a lot less commercial activity but at a similar remove from London.

Petts Wood we encountered in driving rain. It has something in common with Whetstone in being located either side of a busy stretch of straight road and lacking the same sense of centrality that other centres possess which feature some variation in their morphology. The fact that it is not a large centre emphasises this feeling. Having said this, there were people about and the shops were generally local and looked healthy.

Bromley is a centre on a different scale altogether from the other two. We reached in via a bus from Petts Wood and made our way through ‘outskirts’ before entering the main central area. Two features of the centre perhaps relate to its relative size: firstly, it has a key ‘ringy’ section which connects the main shopping streets to the access roads around it to the north, and secondly, the main High Street is pedestrianised and rather ‘Clone Town-like’ in my opinion, although local butchers and jewellers were also present to suggest what an older Bromley may have looked like. Going north of the High Street onto the section that allowed traffic through, it began to look a bit run down although there were some new businesses such as hairdressing (the fast-food of services). There is also a large enclosed shopping centre to the south of the High Street called ‘The Glades’. Although as anonymous as any such centre it seemed popular and well connected to the high street – although we didn’t explore this connectivity in any depth.

By the time we reached Beckenham it was dark and we were quite tired. I found it quite a curious place though. It suggested a further morphological attribute to help characterise the centres we have looked at (straight, split around a corner, y-triangulated, ringy). The High Street, which is basically divided into two sections around right-angled corner, appears to be broken up into many different sections because of topographical factors such as small bends in the road and gently hilly terrain. There may be more commercial activity in the smaller streets off the centre but we didn’t get a chance to have a look at these.

Sustainable Communities Bill

This is a post about the private member’s bill adopted by Nick Hurd MP (Con for Ruislip-Northwood) following a campaign by Local Works, a lobby group closely associated to the New Economics Foundation, who published the reports on Clone Town Britain (2005) and Ghost Town Britain (2003). The bill is called The Sustainable Communities Bill

To quote from today’s article on the BBC website the bill “would give councils the right to demand a breakdown of government spending on their services, and to go back to ministers with their own alternative allocations…It would also require ministers to give the issue of promoting ’sustainable communities’ more priority, and to come up with a long-term plan to do so, in co-operation with local people”.

The Bill has cross party support and is supported by David Cameron (see article in Guardian Newspaper). Private member’s bills rarely become law if they conflict with the government’s agenda. A relevant minister was interviewed on the Today programme this morning who claimed it was over bureaucratic and that devolving planning power too locally would make a nonsense of the planning system.

We’ll know by the end of today whether the bill passed its second reading but it is worth reading because it directly addresses the question of which policy framework can help encourage economic diversity in local town centres.

Suburbs of Greater London North

On Monday, 15th January OS and SG went on a field trip to selected suburbs in the north of the Greater London area: High Barnet – New Barnet – Whetstone – North Finchley & Finchley. All the suburbs feature as centres in the DCLG study and all except New Barnet are on the Northern Line. From a morphological and motor-transport perspective it is significant that all of the suburbs, again excepting New Barnet, are situated along busy roads (in three cases the Great North Road A1000) with a relatively high degree of residential densification – besides having close proximity to predominantly interwar suburban housing estates. This location along access roads may also explain the relatively high degree of office space apparent around the centres, especially south of Whetstone.

Four of the suburbs seemed more or less ’successful’ in the sense that there was strong evidence of diversity and dynamism around the high streets. The exception, again, was New Barnet which seemed relatively quiet and run-down. The absence of a tube link, its situation away from the Great North Road and its location between the two larger centres of High Barnet, Whetstone and the minor centre of Cockfosters are likely to provide part of the explanation. Other explanations may lie in the absence of a strong connection between New Barnet overground station – where much of the recent intensification has taken place, and the town centre. It is possible that the centre has not benefitted from the these local developments.

High Barnet is a centre of two halves which pivots at the intersection of three roads at the point where the church and Barnet college are located at the top of the hill. The stretch of road going up Barnet Hill from the tube station into the High Street is distinctively more downmarket than the section along Hadley Green which runs from the church to the Spires shopping centre. Whereas the former had a studenty feel owing to the presence of Barnet College and snack bars to cater to the students, the latter is a typical high street with a mixture of chain and local businesses. The Spires shopping centre is certainly ‘clone town’ but is well integrated into the High Street and the cafes were more distinctive and populated by a range of local people.( Link to article giving local plans for redevelopment of Barnet College.)

Whetstone is located almost entirely along an extended straight section of the A1000. The road is particularly busy and wide at this point and divided by a central reservation. The pavements are wide and a number of new restaurants, including Ask and Pizza Express, appear to be thriving whereas some older comparison retail shops have recently closed down. There is office space located at the south end of the centre which generally serves an affluent suburban area. The predominant street life on our visit was provided by schoolchildren waiting for buses.

North Finchley is a distinctively more ‘urban’ centre in the sense that it is on a significantly larger scale to northerly suburbs and feels relatively metropolitan in its wide range of shops, offices and increased ethnic diversity. The recently constructed arts depot, situated at the intersection of the A1000, Ballards Lane and Woodhouse Road, is the natural focus of the centre (in a similar way to John the Baptist church in High Barnet). Unfortuntately it is rather cut off from the street life on either side of the High Road (A1000) owing to a plethora of secruity fences and the fact that it seems rather ‘hidden’. This is a shame as is a bustling centre.

Finchely proper (located on the A598) has a more urban feel again. There is a lot of office space, some vacant and a strongly multi-cultural population testified to by the variety of scripts on shop and estate agents’ signs. Once again the ‘natural centre’ of Finchley lies below the tube at the three-way intersection of Regent’s Park Road (A598), Gravel and Hendon Lane. (The triangular structures formed by these intersections seems characteristic of these suburbs located along major access roads to London and could provide a focus in our study). It is not clear whether this centre is working as well as it could though there is plenty of economic activity and street-activity; overall it seems rather fragmented along its length.

Sunday in the NE suburbs – some initial observations

On Sunday a (very) sympathetic friend and I went on a mini-tour of some North East suburbs of Greater London in the Borough of Redbridge. Our route was: South Woodford – Loughton – Epping – Chingford [links to Wikipedia] At each place we simply got out of the car and wandered around until we’d formed a basic impression – so what follows is no more than that.

Since OS and I will revist some of these suburbs on a fact-finding mission for the project I won’t go into detail here but it’s worth recording that, on a Sunday afternoon, all four centres were lively with busy restaurants, cafés and shops (when these were these were open). All of the suburbs we visited are on the Central Line and there were signs of City money in the large number of expensive sports cars (and houses). There was, however, visible diversity in terms of generations and income – though ethnically overwhelmingly white and English speaking – suggesting the presence of a stable community. There was also considerable ethnic diversity in terms of population but this did not seem to be manifested in the kind of shops and overall ‘feel’ of the places which are unmistakably English suburban (at least superficially) – in other words this ethnic diversity seemed quite ‘invisible’ if you didn’t look carefully.

South Woodford is a large, affluent centre on the North Circular with a sizeable Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Pizza Express and Laura Ashley Home and local eateries but little apparent office activity. Loughton is a more traditional high street with a long strip supporting a wide variety of shops and restaurants, including (nearby) an M&S food. These have spilled off the main road in places to occupy a premises which are not traditional shops – which I take to be a sign of health; there are also some small offices and a large Sainsbury’s. The woman in WH Smiths said the Daily Mail was the most popular Sunday paper “by far”. Epping (beyond the M25) still resembles an old market town but is suprisingly down market (relatively) in terms of retail with an Argos, Wimpey and ‘Favourite Chicken’ takeaway on the main strip besides some pubs, banks and estate agents. Chingford – perhaps the most interesting – has a wide variety of healthy looking non-chain shops besides the ubiquitous Nero’s.

In terms of selecting case studies my feeling was that South Woodford is perhaps too large and urbanised a suburb to be quite what we’re after and Epping, out beyond the Green Belt (and the doughnut), is a distinctive case that might not be ideal for comparative analysis with our other cases studies. Loughton and particularly Chingford though, seem like real possibilities. Chingford especially possesses a relatively high degree of diversity of population and a mix of local and some chain shops besides local facilities such as library. However, there was little evidence of  office space around the high street area.

Professor Murray Fraser on the Anglo-American Suburb

Just to give a brief synopsis of a lecture given to the AAS students by Professor Murray Fraser of Wesminster University which was wide in scope and rich in detail. The main thrust of his argument was that the ‘Anglo-American’ suburb is a distinctive entity which can only be understood within a historical framework of close interchange between the two countries. The Garden City, for example, he saw as an originally American concept, taken up by Howard and his followers and then resold to America, most recently as the New (sub)Urbanism.

Crucial to this narrative is the post-war exodus of European architects to the United States as the country in which their modernist vision was most likely to be realised. This vision was then exported back across the Atlantic in the form of staple features of suburban life such as big fridge-freezers, large cars and supermarkets. ‘How American are we?’ as an early edition of the Sunday Times colour supplement (early 1960s) put it, in response to the rise of American style conspicuous-consumption in the UK.

Arguing from a similar perspective as Dr Mark Clapson, also of Westminster, Murray sees the suburb as an essentially progressive environment in which the both consumption and production occur within a modern, techonology rich and environmentally attractive (if not necessarily sustainable) setting in which individual freedom is paramount. The range of suburban types suggest that it is less helpful to speak of ‘city’ and ’suburb’ than of ‘patterns of strong and weak urbanism’. Professor Fraser suggested (provocatively) that the shopping mall was the major modernist contribution to architecture. With regard to Successful Suburban Town Centres, it is clear that he would advocate a ‘realist’ rather than ‘idealist’ approach to suburban living as a pattern of living at the forefront of social change that can only be planned ’so far’.

Emerging Work Patterns and their Effect on Suburban Town Centres

In Future Forms and Design for Sustainable Cities (Jenks and Dempsey, 2005), it is proposed that the assertion that the rise in telecommunications will lessen the need for a physical focal point for activities is wrong (p. 19) and in a section by Nicola Gillen on Emerging Work Patterns it is proposed that future work patterns will include organisations that operate across a virtual network, but will still be reliant on face-to-face communication. Moreover, “mobility means that virtual workers have to be close to, or often pass through, major transport hubs in cities. Cities provide the greatest opportunities and physical places to connect… mobile people.” (p. 343). The author goes on to suggest that one of the modes of provision are public places, such as cafes where people can “pause, gather and have time to connect. These are places such as train stations, airports, hairdressers and coffee shops”. (p. 350).

It is interesting to note, following our discussion this morning, that many of these assertions may apply equally well to suburban town centres, but in contrast to the high status occupations described in the city model, what we may find in the suburbs are going to be high tech workers, consultants (that is people working on an ad-hoc basis for companies) and the self-employed, who may very well work part of the time at home, but need (as we’ve already discussed) a more formal setting for external meetings. The suburban coffee shop may very well be the ideal location for this and if we follow the model proposed by Gillen, the two factors that make for a coffee shop that can function in this way are high-speed internet connection and a transport hub. (There may be other public places that function in this way in suburban town centres – any suggestions? the local town hall perhaps?) I suggest therefore that part of our data-gathering should specifically consider this as a possible additional factor in the success of suburban town centres.