High Streets and Mary Portas

'Tis the time of year for asinine and caveated headlines like 'It's expected to be one of the busiest shopping days of the year'.  This apparently applies to the Saturday before Christmas Eve, and Christmas Eve, and the day after Boxing Day, and the Saturday after Christmas Day, and, and.

As ever at Christmas, I've headed back to the parents' house to eat some Quality Street and play with the dog.  I also like to check in on the market town's High Street (I'm going to shorten this to HS), to see how thing's changed since I was last there.  During my school years, I saw the local HS curl up and die.  In response to the redevelopment of the indoor shopping precinct (and the last-but-one recession), the main stores moved from the Victorian HS, and those units filled with charity shops and pound stores.  Only in the mid-Nineties, when a local campus became a part of Luton University, did the HS awaken, albeit as a slightly-downmarket run of studenty pubs and kebab shops, thereby supplying the small-town needs of booze, meat fat and somewhere to fight.

Earlier this month, Queen of Shops, Mary Portas (try not to think of a ginger Liza Minnelli from Cabaret) released her review of the future of HS across the land.  Firstly, I should say that I think she's largely right.  HS cannot, and should not try to, compete with the brute-force selling power of large chain retailers, and the internet.  No-one benefits from dead and deserted town centres and HS.

However, I found her My Struggle prose rather over-the-top.  Portas wants to represent her commentary as a non-governmental and therefore independent and therefore personal and therefore unbiased and therefore accurate telling of how things really are.  'The only hope our high streets have of surviving in the future,' she intones, 'is to recognise what’s happened and deliver something new'.  Our plucky HS have become cognisant - it is for them to be sentient and understand their past and future.  Help us, Obi Wan Kenobi.

Portas then indulges in a classic sophomoric essay technique, exploring a variety of meanings of a key term, in this case 'heart' (the centre of something / life-giving / strength of feeling / expression of fidelity / emotional engagement / love etc etc).  She emotes:

High streets are the heart of towns and communities. They have been for centuries. People are passionate about high streets. They may have different views on what’s wrong and what’s right, but I don’t believe anyone can put their hand on their heart and say they don’t care.

[my, laboured, emphases]

(No, I don't)

In addition to (relentlessly) demonstrating her strength of faith (repeating 'believe' eleven times in the three-side Foreword), there's also a 'vision' which aims 'to find and nurture tomorrow's innovators and ideas that will create the new sustainable high streets of the future'.  Yuk.  The not-quite-heroic hyperbole continues with the underwhelming claim to have 'visited many high streets to see what the situation is for myself...'.  Wow!  Such dedication to the Noble Cause.  Literally several!

Anyway.  The niceties of her text are not (supposed to be) the point.  Rather, the focus is on her 28 concluding recommendations for revitalising HS.  There're some technical taxation / land 'use class' thoughts (the latter aiming to reduce the rash of betting shops), and a 'visionary' benign dictatorship of 'Town Teams' seeking to make it all better.  Another of her proposals is to encourage local markets, and 'establish a new "National Market Day" where budding shopkeepers can try their hand at operating a low-cost retail business'.  A nation of shopkeepers, indeed.  But I suspect that Portas means something none-too-glamorous: she elsewhere suggested that HS should host car boot sales.  Indeed a 'low-cost retail business'.  Hmm.  Lucky HS.

Furthermore, in my experience, markets fall into two categories.  Firstly, the cheapo back-of-a-lorry 'spectatulars' to be found in most towns, somewhere near the bus station and some cafés serving OAP Specials on Wednesdays.  Whilst there may be a romantic view of salt-of-the-earth traders, there's also the risk of crap quality, knock-off goods, and no hope of redress from a stall you might never see again.

The other contemporary manifestation of the market comes in the tedious cabal of Famers' Markets, where the aspirational classes joyfully subscribe to the pretence of 'authentic' and 'better' 'rural' food by buying an £8 quiche from a 'farmer' / man in a Barbour jacket outside Putney Tube station (cf the 'Organic Duck Fat Is Good For You Because It's Expensive' syndrome).

And the middle ground?  It's chain supermarkets.  That's why they are so popular.  They're a place to find half-decent veg and half-decent meat at half-decent prices, without fear of being ripped-off by a Del Boy or financing a  Fearnley-Whittingstall's third Jag.  It may not be particularly good food, but it's hygienically packaged, and there's no need to interact with a grubby man with a common accent (cf the 'Waitrose Cows Make Posher Milk Than The Ones Who Work For Morrisons' syndrome).  Perfect.  Well, perfect enough.

Anyway.  Portas' ideas are nice enough, provided there is a critical mass of genuinely useful services provided along the HS - an actual reason to go there, and overcome the challenges of congestion, inadequate parking, swathes of betting shops, etc. I can see this 'vision' working in affluent areas.  For example, SW11's Northcote Road already supports independent artisanal breadmakers, Brio-heavy toy shops, and music stores specialising in instruments for under-elevens.  However, being near the well-to-do sub-suburb of Wandsworth Common (which is in Balham), and the country's busiest rail station, Clapham Junction (which is in Battersea), cannot hurt.  I just can't see those with less disposable incoming being in a position to stop taking advantage of the bulk-buying economies of supermarkets and the .coms to financially support local traders.

What Portas' Manifesto does do well, is open the debate.  HS are dying, and retail parks are thriving, because of our choices.  We'd much prefer to blame someone else (cf the 'It's The Bank's Fault They Gave Me A 110% Mortgage And Now I'm In Negative Equity' syndrome).  But we have opted to turn our backs on small stores, and embrace the convenience of the internet and plastic sheds on ring roads.

As a final note, when Googling 'Mary Portas', the first hits are ads for her brands at places like House of Fraser, Clarks and (I don't want to think about her gusset) Mytights.com.  It's as if all this bluster about HS might actually, and quite coincidentally, make Ms Portas some money.

From online retail.  Hmm.

Foreign: Krakow (Nowa Huta)

As part of it's 2011 EU Presidency bumf, Poland has put together a free English-language paperback advertising the delights of Poland, its cities and its citizens ('About Polska').  It's mainly anodyne and harmless sub-propaganda ('We see ourselves as friendly, welcoming folk' etc etc), encouraging tourists to pop over and spend some dosh before the EU implodes and the Euro becomes the Deutsch Mark Mk II.

Amongst its pages on the Krakow, the book mentions a place called Nowa Huta, describing it as 50s 'social engineering experiment' that is now 'a troubled district...that fascinates with its grandiose Stalinist architecture'.  As a high-risk tourism venture goes, it's up there with London advertising 'Come to Norwood Junction - it's edgy.  There are chicken bones.  Mmm'.  But, having nearly collected the full set of English 50s New Towns, I thought I'd take the opportunity to see how the Socialists did urban planning back then.

The whole settlement of Nova Huta was inflicted on the middle-classes of Krakow, for their refusal to vote for Uncle Vladimir in a post-war referendum.  The idea was to balance out the vile Krakowiak bourgeois with some honest-to-goodness salt-of-the-earth Workers.  Hence the New Town was focused on a steel works - a vast complex, which once held the largest blast furnace in Europe.

The receptionist at the hotel was clearly somewhat dismayed that I was asking how to get to Nowa Huta, rather than the walled charms of the Old Town.  She told me I could catch a tram directly Howa Huta, but was unable to tell me how I'd know when I'd actually reached there...

So I got off the tram sort-of at random, on the basis that I had passed the picturesque kitsch of the Old Town some time ago (and a couple of really horrid PoMo shopping centres).  I could see some post-war 50s-ish buildings, so hoped I might be in the right sort of area.  These point blocks look distinctly similar to the medium-rise things we have dotted around the UK (particularly now they're adorned with satellite dishes).  So far, so not very exciting.

'...grandiose Stalinist...'?

But, fortuitously stumbling (I was well off the tourist maps of Krakow here) upon the main square of Plac Centralny, I found the huge radiating boulevards of Socialist Realist blocks - 6-storey rendered and arcaded rows of apartments and ground-floor shops.

That's my shadow in the bottom right.

I appear to be saluting.

This aerial shot shows the design of the development - with the Plac at the bottom, the main avenues fanning out, with housing blocks filling up the spaces in betweeb.

 Copyright: teh internets

I mentioned before how social and political ideas are so often manifested in the buildings of the time.  For example, English New Towns like Welwyn Garden City were built with swathes of trees and parks as a reaction to the dense slum housing of the industrial revolution, to enhance the quality of life for the residents.  As an added bonus, and quite terrifyingly, the greenery of Nova Huta was included to help soak up the radiation from the feared nuclear war; the wide streets would prevent the spread of apocalyptic fires; and the layout of the housing blocks meant that the city could be turned into a walled fortress with comparative ease.  Serious stuff.

According to a slim volume I later bought from the one-room Howa Huta Museum, these blocks were originally pretty dismal inside, with 'no central heating, no sewage system...the floors were simply lined with bare, unplaned planks'.  That said, in the setting wintery sun, the blocks looked a little like the cute pastiche of somewhere like Welwyn (although, as if the punchline to a Victoria Wood skit, rather than a whopping great steel plant, Welwyn had a Shredded Wheat factory). Presumably completing the aims of this design, the outside of the blocks looked quite attractive to a Prole like me.

Off to the east of the main housing matrix lies the eponymous steel works, its huge on-stilts signage rising up from the trams' power cables.  From a distance, it looks a bit like Croydon's Ikea.

Ampere Way, Communist style

The administrative blocks standing of either side of the sign are topped with a comb attic of renaissance details, nodding to the fluted stylings of the Old Town buildings.  The steel works - apparently still in operation - are closed off behind some gates.

Amazing bit of sans serif on dynamic stilts.

Broken ice floated on the surface of the Nowa Huta lake, as I headed back towards the warmth of the hotel.  It was cold.