In a previous role was privileged to be involved in the promotion of my local area, working with other businesses and the wider community to encouraging investment building spaces that felt safe, places that people wanted to visit.
Over 10 years there was so much I learnt about how cities, towns, and communities thrive.
The complex ingredients that are required to make our places work for the people who live in and visit them. The combination of economics, human behaviour & public policy.
How to predict and plan to provide spaces that feel safe, that encourage investment, and that encourage footfall, people moving to an area, investing in an area, visiting an area. And why it is so important to the overall wellbeing and self-esteem of a community to have a have a thriving, vibrant locale.
It is an extraordinarily complex ecosystem and obviously the bigger the urban space the more complex it becomes. It is why there is huge talk about the future of cities post-Covid.
The 2020 crisis has changed our behaviours, we have adopted technologies that although not new we previously had been reluctant to use. We are now all comfortable with virtual meetings and phone calls and whilst we recognise that they are not the same or as rich as face-to-face meetings we also recognise the convenience. Working for home is imperfect but even for those living in small spaces, there are still some advantages to avoiding the daily commute.
Whilst home working will never totally replace the office, humans know that we need to be with each other to create the environments needed for creativity and we know that even the most antisocial or introverted of us do need other humans to interact with occasionally. Nonetheless it is unlikely that after all of this that we will go back to how it used to be.
We have proven that working from home or some hybrid model can work, and not only would it perhaps have benefits for our wellbeing it could have several financial benefits to our employers who will no longer need to invest in centrally located, vast and expensive office spaces to house a full team. In some hybrid model, the office will have a different purpose, a place for meetings or co-working or even socialising with colleagues. In short, it is unlikely that we will be returning to our cities in the huge numbers that we previously did or at least for the same reasons we did.
This has huge implications. Without the commuters and the office workers who will be in the city and what will the purpose of the city be?
With fewer people in the city, there will be an impact on retail and hospitality businesses based in the city.
The trend in retail has been towards online and the innovative big players already could see this. Many of the large brand shops that are found in city shopping centers these days are not expected to take the money they used to, the shopping is done online, but the store is the ‘stall’, it is the place for browsing and trying on and touching. This will still exist, many of us will still want to browse before we buy but there will be less of us.
What many shopping centers have done in recent years is to react to this change by realising that if it is not the actual shopping that people are coming for then what they need to create is experiences. Days out for families. Hence why there have been more hospitality venues in shopping centers, why there are now cinemas, climbing walls, crazy golf. It is the opportunity for a family day out with the ‘shopping’ becoming almost incidental to the experience. A day out to the city shopping centre is now more like a trip to Centre Parcs.
For this reason, the shopping centers that were already on the curve will find and lead the way. But what about the rest of the city center? How can the whole city adapt and repurpose itself particularly when once you step out of a shopping center every building is privately owned by individuals or different companies who are often faceless and don’t know each other, who have different business objectives and different values. The repurposing of the city needs to be done through collaboration which is impossible if you don’t have a relationship with anyone else.
If the city loses a significant number of office workers and therefore the shoppers there will be less retail. Then the problem is, in areas with many boarded-up shops it becomes undesirable to be a passer-by or a resident.
Already walking around my local town I see shop after shop boarded up, already unable to find a way to get through this crisis. And whilst it is always the case that some businesses do not survive, in normal times this happens at a rate that allows other investors to come along to have a go. The case currently though is traumatic, the number of places shutting is massive and there are too few people currently able to invest so shops are boarded waiting for a change in fortune which may or may not come.
In a worst case, this causes a huge existential problem for hospitality businesses in cities.
How do you exist if the office workers, the shoppers, the visitors, and the residents decline in numbers? And once you start losing hospitality, the risk is a spiral of decline.
There will not be many of us who feel comfortable walking down a street of boarded-up shops. The reason? because we don’t feel safe and we don’t feel safe because there is no one else there.
Hospitality businesses are the warm lights in the night that keep you safe on the streets.
When you have a vibrant high street, whether you personally use the shops and venues yourself you feel safe because within those shops and venues there are other people.
They become safe bolt holes for you and those people become eyes to watch out for you.
A pub, bar, or restaurant that opens on a high street does more than just add to the offering for passers-by, it is more than a place to go to eat, more than a place to meet friends, more than a place that makes an area vibrant. it is also a place that keeps your community safe.
It is a place where if ever you do feel threatened you can walk in and take shelter, it is a place that when you are walking around there are other people coming and going who can keep an eye out for you it is a place where there will always be people who will come to your rescue whenever you need it.
It is a place that is far more effective at keeping our streets safe than any CCTV camera.
If the office workers go, and the retail goes and the pubs, bars, and restaurants fail then who will be left, who will want to live in these spaces? Once you reach that point how do you come back from it?
I know there is talk of repurposing the city but the trend in the decline of the Highstreet has been here for a long time and as yet this great revolution has not occurred, there is not an obvious or easy solution. Our cities are complex ecosystems. But whilst we wait for the solution it is our hospitality businesses keeping our streets safe.
The current policy of keeping pubs closed during this pandemic has been proven to have no scientific basis. However, the consequences are far graver and complex than those being discussed. It is not just about the economic wellbeing of the operators, it is not just about the mental health & wellbeing of the communities it is about the fabric of our neighborhood, it is about having places where we feel safe, that are vibrant, and that are desirable.
Pubs provide so much more than just a place to have a drink or make some money. It is far more critical than just the obvious economic or wellbeing arguments.
Whilst offices and retail can not necessarily be saved hospitality businesses can.
Please join the #pubsmatter campaign and let you MP know why pubs matter to you.
