Retail-led regeneration: has the penny dropped?

Over the past decade most town and city centre regeneration plans have been based around building or redeveloping a shopping centre. We have seen transformative schemes in Liverpool, Birmingham and Leicester, amongst others.

Seven years ago, when we held the first of our annual Northern Regeneration Summits, experts were confidently predicting that retail opportunities in the big cities would soon be exhausted, and the next places to benefit would be the 'second tier' northern towns such as Blackburn, Burnley and Barnsley.

Many towns responded by planning wholesale retail-led regeneration schemes for their centres. Now, however, commentators say that the stagnant economy and rise of internet shopping have brought almost all such schemes to a halt.

Indeed, some experts argue that the trend to internet-shopping, combined with other trends such as the big fashion retailers' increasing preference for concentrating their outlets in the 60 or 70 most lucrative centres, means that wholesale retail-led redevelopment will never again be a viable option for many smaller towns.

Last week I met Chris Goddard and Gerry Hughes of the consultants GVA Grimley. They are among the commentators warning that too many councils are planning on the basis of outdated assumptions about never-ending retail growth in town centres.

Towns that are struggling to get big retail schemes off the ground may have to consider going back to the drawing board, they say. Among the options they could consider are:

1) Breaking a large retail scheme into several smaller parts.

2) Changing the phasing of the scheme's development, with the aim of starting work on the most immediately viable component. Hughes said that they days had gone when developers would gamble on the viability of the first phase of a development in expectation of making their return on the second or third.

3) Accepting a different type of retailer to anchor the scheme than that originally proposed. They said some schemes which had lost department store tenants have been attracting interest from supermarket chains.

4) Targeting alternative uses to retail. Stockport Council, for example, is apparently reworking retail-led plans to focus more on leisure.

5) Redesigning mixed-use schemes so that the mixing becomes vertical rather than horizontal. For instance, this would mean building offices next to homes or shops, rather than below or above them.

6) Focussing on attracting independent retailers. Goddard, however, warns that meeting such objectives requires a landlord with a "controlling mind" who is prepared to forego short-term rent revenue to achieve the right mix of shops long-term. Local authorities could make stipulations about the initial lettings on new schemes, but can't do much more than that, he says.

Some of these ideas will stir misgivings among some regeneration practitioners. For example, the obvious danger of rephasing, or changing from horizontal to vertical mixes, is that the most profitable part of the scheme gets built, but no progress is made on other important elements - perhaps the elements that prompted the public sector to back the scheme in the first place.

But, with vacancies in town centre shops continuing to rise, and internet shopping continuing to grow, it is surely right that councils should be increasingly be looking beyond large-scale retail when planning how to regenerate their town centres.

Do you agree? Can you point to concrete examples out there of where public bodies have adapted their approach to take account of this new reality? Hughes and Goddard have promised to come back to me with their own examples, but in the meantime it would also be great to get some other perspectives. Or do you think that the rise in shop vacancies is no more than a blip, and that ambitious retail-led redevelopment is still a sensible and viable medium to long-term option for many towns? Either way, it would be good to hear your views.

Pigs obscure the green shoots

In the battle of the pigs and the green shoots, the pigs have it. 

Last week it was hysteria over swine flu; this week it's the entertaining expenses merry-go-round over snouts in the trough. This all fills airtime, but it's a shame that it obscured the serious economic story that even in the embattled US things look nowhere near as bad as some predicted, and that the recession in the UK may have bottomed out. 

Although some serious news organs have carried this, notably the consistently fair and balanced Financial Times, many others, including the BBC, seem more interested in pigs, sneezes, chandeliers and eyeliner than investigating whether the green shoots that some can see are real or illusory. 

Certainly, it needs looking into. Regenerators will be buoyed by more data this morning that there are even signs of recovery in the moribund housing market. In other news, UK retail sales have risen at their fastest rate for three years; and the decline in UK manufacturing has slowed up. 

This is all fascinating – and important to all our lives. You'd think that after the blanket coverage of the economy when things appear to be dropping off a cliff, the press would be interested when things show signs of improvement. Not so. The pigs will surely die soon, but the press will keep flogging them. 

A break in the clouds

I reckon it's worth counting back at the end of an extraordinary week in public policy, which reached its peak with the Budget, which ensured a fun-filled evening for many of my fellow journalists and a whole bunch of economists calculating the extend of the national debt. A brief flick through the papers tell us that it's about £23,000 for every person in the UK, but the figure varies depending on which paper you read – or at least believe. 

The large debt must be a concern – after all at some point we are going to have to pay it back. It is stating the obvious to point out that this can be done in a number of ways of course, either by raising taxation, cutting public services, or allowing the growth in spending on services to fall behind the growth in the economy, whenever that may come about. The latest numbers make grim reading, so it could be a while yet. 

Regen.net readers might worry that regeneration and economic development might become victims under this government or the next, simply because it is easier for a government to make cuts to such areas than it is to the the NHS or education, the two areas which are, perfectly reasonably it might be said, seen as the most important in the public's eyes. As Regeneration & Renewal will report on Monday, DCLG alone has been asked to find £100 million in so-called efficiency savings, a phrase whose meaning is sometimes inferred by many in the public sector to mean as collateral damage does to civilians in a warzone. 

So reasons to be cheerful? Well, as one tabloid pointed out, at least it is sunny. Economic confidence has improved sharply, according to the pollster Mori, perhaps due to a growing feeling that we are approaching the bottom of this slump. Retail sales are up year on year. And, the Footsie – far from a perfect science admittedly – is going to finish the week well up. And, for the next few hours at least, it is Friday, so have a good weekend and we'll be back on Monday for more. 

Forget Tokyo: It's time to rid Oxford Circus of traffic

Oxford Street is set for a taste of Tokyo. Oxford Circus, the intersection between London's most famous shopping street and the elegant Regent Street, is to be reworked. Under the plans, traffic approaching the crossroads from all four directions will be halted simultaneously at red lights, allowing pedestrians to cross diagonally as well as straight ahead en masse. The scheme, modelled on the Shibuya crossing in the Japanese capital, will also see much of the ugly street clutter and barriers that blight Oxford Circus removed.

That may help, but it won't help enough. Inexplicably – certainly to Londoners, many of whom try their best to avoid it – Oxford Circus is among the world's top destinations, getting 200 million visitors a year. For visitors from smaller countries, the concentration of so many big retail brands in a long, wide thoroughfare may command awe, briefly, but it doesn't take much more than a second glance to see that London's shopping heartland is something approaching a national disgrace. Londoners may know there are plenty of better areas to spend a Saturday shopping in the capital, many visitors don't.

Blessed with a grand boulevard and fine buildings, Oxford Street has managed to fashion a sow's ear from a silk purse. The pavements are way too narrow to accommodate the throng of confused tourists and exasperated locals that blend awkwardly in the area. Shabby transitory retailers pollute the Tottenham Court Road end of the street. There is clutter everywhere – poor signage, ugly street furniture and unlicensed advertisements for such delights as the never-ending golf sale. But the area's fundamental problem is its traffic.

In spite of being closed to general traffic, Oxford Street is plagued by motor vehicles. These are chiefly buses moving at a snail's pace in a noisy, smelly, grumbling thin red lines; plus a few cabs with frustrated drivers and the odd lost boy-racer in a sports car. The air quality and environment is unpleasant – even crossing the road can be an ordeal.

A few pilot traffic-free days run by the New West End Company have been hits with shoppers, so the question is, instead of messing about with Tokyo-style pedestrian crossings, why not abolish traffic in Oxford Street completely and open up the street to pedestrians? Some people will moan that they can no longer catch their bus from outside, say, John Lewis, but this is a price worth paying. A clever programme of re-routing would do the trick, and people would get used to it.

Many of the world's best shopping areas are pedestrianised – including many in London itself, such as Covent Garden. It seems ludicrous that its biggest draw is relegated to monumental embarrassment by the smoke and choke of jammed-up traffic.