Rip out ugly street clutter and tame traffic to revive UK high streets, thinktank says
A Create Streets report argues that cheap, small changes, from removing guardrails to swapping parking for bike spaces, beat costly revamps in bringing town centres back to life.
By Olga Menon ·
The long decline of the British high street may not require multimillion-pound revamps to reverse, a new report has argued. Instead, smaller and cheaper changes that make town and city centres more appealing places to linger could offer a better answer.
The study, led by the urban thinktank Create Streets and produced with bike storage maker Cyclehoop, says too many urban centres are places "designed to be driven through, not for time to be spent in". Alongside a lack of imagination, it blames planning regulations that favour conformity and clutter, and that too often treat speeding cars as a given to which everything else must adjust.
The report describes the default high street as "engineered for traffic and furnished from a catalogue", with tarmac pavements, guardrails penning people at the kerb, litter bins from a procurement catalogue and rows of plastic planters adding up to public investment that is joyless.
While planners have traditionally treated car access as a measure of a thriving town centre, calculations for the report suggest replacing parking with other kerbside uses creates more economic value. One parking space on a market town high street is typically used by about 3.5 vehicles a day, bringing in just over £73,000 a year in spending at nearby shops. The same 12 square metres used for nine share e-bikes generates an average of 13 trips a day and more than £146,000 a year in spending, even accounting for the lower average spend per person.
In a busier city, where shared bikes are used more often, the estimated annual spend rises to more than £300,000. Turning the space over to outside dining brings smaller gains, but in a city centre it can still amount to around £120,000 in extra annual spending.
Calling use by families "the indicator species of a healthy high street", the report cites what it calls the wrist test: whether it feels safe to let go of a young child's wrist so they can roam with some freedom. That, it argues, is best achieved by removing the threat of speeding motor vehicles rather than mitigating their impact. It calls ripping out pedestrian guardrails "the most cost-effective upgrade for the majority of high streets", describing them as eyesores with minimal safety benefits.
The report also takes aim at what it calls "the absurdity of modern public realm management", pointing to Secured by Design, police-backed guidelines on cutting neighbourhood crime that critics say can lead to benches and plants being removed in the name of discouraging antisocial behaviour.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has pledged to try to reverse the decline of high streets, announcing a £210m regeneration fund in September. But the bulk of that money will go into buildings, such as turning old shops into shared workspaces or community cafes and keeping pubs and clubs in business. The report argues that renovating buildings is pointless if the street outside is unappealing, and calls for "a presumption of removal where an item cannot be justified".
The effects of such changes can be dramatic, the study says, pointing to Altrincham in Cheshire, where the creation of a walkable, car-free urban area helped retail vacancies fall from over 30% to 7% in less than a decade. Nor do such projects have to be expensive: an unused patch of land next to a church in Grimsby was turned into a park for less than £20,000.
"Streets that are ugly are not so because councils lack the desire to change them, but because the system is counting the maintenance liabilities, not the benefits," said David Milner of Create Streets. "What works is cheap: trees in the ground, benches people want to sit on, clutter taken away." He added that too much of what is built now looks temporary, more like road works than public realm improvements, and urged a concept of permanence, such as trees planted in the ground rather than in giant pots.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: "We support local leaders to make decisions on pedestrianisation based on their communities' needs. Our Hope on the High Street strategy will help local people revive town centres by protecting community assets, bringing derelict buildings back into use and tackling the spread of vape and gambling shops. Funding is available for local leaders to spend on their priorities, including pedestrianising and regenerating their high streets if they so wish."
