Does the death of the high street matter – if we are in a new era of the ‘Playground City’?

There is plenty of handwringing over the retail apocalypse and the work from home boom turning our urban centres into ghost towns – but what if these spaces are just quietly transforming into something more vibrant and exciting, asks Katie Rosseinsky?

While central London will always be a magnet for visitors, consumers, says a senior lecturer in architecture and urbanism, are now ‘looking to their town and city centres not for buying stuff but in terms of having experiences’ (iStock / Getty)

Whenever my parents needed to pacify three fractious girls under the age of seven, they only had to take us on a trip to Woolworths. The crowning glory of our high street had something to distract each one of us. A bin full of S Club 7 and Gareth Gates singles for me. Outlandish dressing up outfits for my middle sister. Pick ’n’ mix for us both. A wonderland of noisy, shiny toys for the baby.

By the time Woolies went into administration almost a decade later, we felt a pang of nostalgia, but we’d largely outgrown it. Now allowed to venture further afield, I was in the throes of my teenage Topshop years. The closest branch was a four-storey colossus that dominated the main shopping street; I’d spend entire Saturday afternoons trying on different outfits (and different identities), scouring the rails for the Kate Moss-designed dresses that seemed like a passport to a cooler world.

The high street felt like an exciting place. But Woolies was just the first domino to fall in the retail apocalypse. The Topshop in the centre of Liverpool currently stands empty; instead, I can flick through its latest collections on the Asos app, or attempt to track down older pieces second-hand on Vinted. I was hooked on online shopping before the pandemic, of course, but lockdown only intensified the habit. Topshop is far from the only former high street stalwart to have disappeared. The most recent casualty is Wilko, once my go-to for bargain homeware slash general tat (one friend was so distraught at the news of its demise that she visited her local store to “say her goodbyes”).

And then there’s the work-from-home conundrum. Wealthy corporate landlords have started imploring us all to trudge back into the office so we can get footfall back up, spending the best part of £10 on a sad Pret lunch in the process. Empty space across London’s business districts is reportedly at a 30-year high. But isn’t it time we got real about how our habits have changed since Covid – and started to think about how they might shape our cities for the better?

Trains into the city centre are pretty dead at 8am on a Friday, sure. But they are packed come 6pm. It’s not like the pandemic made us want to stop going “out out” – quite the opposite. “If you look at, for example, Tube ridership rates from TfL, and similarly [Metro usage] in cities like New York, at the weekend in particular they were performing really well,” says Kat Hanna, director of strategic advisory and place strategy at commercial real estate company Avison Young. “So that idea that the city is dead is very much not the case”.

Rather, she says, the city has re-emerged “as a place to go and have fun and get back out there”. When I hopped off the train at Manchester Piccadilly on a Friday night a few weeks back, the Northern Quarter was heaving with revellers of all ages (admittedly, my wheelie suitcase did not entirely fit the vibe). The next evening, we visited Diecast, which recently took over the city centre’s biggest old factory building. Now home to a buzzy restaurant and bar, there are plans afoot for a night market, live performances and an in-house brewery; the space also doubles up as a filming location.

Late last year, sales in Manchester’s pubs, restaurants and bars surpassed those recorded in the same period in 2019; Soho House Group is banking on the city, planning to open its first northern outpost in the old Granada Studios building. And further research last year showed that its big rival Liverpool has led the hospitality bounceback, with a 4.4 per cent increase in new venues. Not that this increase in capacity has made it any easier to get a reservation: I’ve queued for the best part of an hour to get into city-centre food hall Duke Street Market.

These spaces couldn’t be further from a 28 Days Later-style vision of emptiness and desolation. Instead, they prove that “the ability of our cities and town centres to adapt to change is pretty strong”, says Holly Lewis, a High Streets Task Force expert and the co-founder of We Made That, a team of researchers, urban designers and architects working in the public sector. In our post-pandemic era, the new emphasis for these urban centres is on the “things that you can’t do so well online”, as Lewis puts it. That might be socialising, eating out, spending time in nature, appreciating the work of local artists… anything that makes the city feel alive.

The challenge for cities is maybe to go back to what they need to make them livable, to make them thrive

Dr Jonathan Clarke, University of Warwick

Economist Edward Glaeser and architect Carlo Ratti summed up the shift earlier this year when they coined the term “Playground City” in a piece for The New York Times. The concept isn’t necessarily about building monkey bars on major thoroughfares or plonking adult-sized seesaws on street corners. Instead, the focus is on “reconfigur[ing] the city into an experience worth leaving the house for” and “ensuring [people] want to spend their nights downtown, even if they are spending their days on Zoom”. It’s not all that different from the vision set out by Mary Portas in her 2011 investigation into the future of our high streets, in which she argued that these hubs need to be “reimagined as destinations for socialising, culture, health, wellbeing, creativity and learning”.

In a “Playground City”, there’s less of a blinkered focus on shopping and working: it’s all about putting experience first. “The idea with cities has been that first and foremost, [they] should be pursuing economic growth, then you can do all the other stuff – you can have parks, you can have good spaces, investment in community centres, all those kind of social benefits,” says Dr Jonathan Clarke, assistant professor at the University of Warwick’s Institute for Global Sustainable Development. “But I think increasingly, that is breaking down. I don’t think that many cities are going to be able to get that kind of [economic] growth. So the challenge for cities is maybe to go back to what they need to make them livable, to make them thrive.”­

A former shopping centre in Taiwan has been transformed into a lagoon (MVRDV)

City centre regeneration was once synonymous with slapping a massive shopping centre in the middle. I can still remember the buzz when the Liverpool One complex opened in 2008, introducing a load of US stores I’d previously fawned over from afar. There was an Urban Outfitters! An American Apparel, which did a thriving trade in disco pants! A Hollister where it was too dark to see what you were actually buying! But embracing “a diversity of activities and uses” is actually “a much more robust” way forward, argues Dr Lucy Montague, senior lecturer in architecture and urbanism at Manchester Metropolitan University. “It’s a relatively recent thing in the whole history of urban development that our city centres have become dominated by retail – it hasn’t always been that way,” she notes.

Consumers, she says, are now “looking to their town and city centres not for buying stuff but in terms of having experiences”. Dr Chloe Steadman, a researcher at the Institute of Place Management, agrees that these spaces are evolving into “multi-functional hubs … They may well provide shops and services, but they also need to provide something experiential, leisure, hospitality, education, housing and so on”.

Many old retail sites are being adapted in playful ways. The sprawling Debenhams building in Liverpool One where I once shopped for prom dresses is now home to gaming venue slash nightlife destination Gravity MAX. And Holly Lewis cites an intriguing example further afield: in 2020, an old Taiwanese shopping centre was transformed into a public “lagoon”, surrounded by plants; the long-term plan is that it will eventually offer city dwellers a “lush jungle” to explore, according to its architects MVRDV.

It’s a relatively recent thing in the whole history of urban development that our city centres have become dominated by retail

Dr Lucy Montague, Manchester Metropolitan University

And there’s a focus on creativity, too. Vacant office space “could be a pop-up space, it could be given to artists who have an exhibition”, Kat Hanna suggests, “something that feels a little bit different and a bit more interesting, and will help get that footfall up”. Dr Montague cites Bobby’s department store in Bournemouth, now home to independently funded arts centre Giant. Coastal towns like Margate and Folkestone are thriving thanks to creative regeneration; to bring a similar buzz to their area, local authorities or landowners could “look at different leasing models for their shops”, says Rebecca Dillon-Robinson, senior urban planner at global engineering and environmental consultancy Ramboll; they could consider offering “more flexible models” and being “more proactive in creating pop-up spaces that allow creative industries to test [it out]”.

In some cases, retailers are simply learning to adapt to what shoppers want now, using their city centre space as showcases, rather than traditional stores. For a case in point, look at the vast Topshop building on Oxford Street. The only site bigger than my local store in Liverpool, it was once the holy site of pilgrimage for fashion-obsessed teens from across the country. But since the brand collapsed, it has been taken over by the Swedish flatpack purveyors at Ikea (the store is set to reopen next year). The baton-passing makes sense: the shoppers who used to flock to Big Topshop to get a glimpse of Alexa Chung doing a DJ set are now probably trying to add a dash of affordable Scandi minimalism to their (rented) flats.

The iconic Topshop building on Oxford Street has been taken over by Ikea (Getty)

The idea is not that customers will have to lug their Billy bookcases onto the Victoria line, but that they will be able to see products IRL, then make an order. “One of the things that’s influencing [the brand] is the drop in car ownership and homeownership in younger generations, which of course means people are not buying big ticket furniture items like they used to, and they’re not going to drive out of town,” Montague says.

A change in regulations means that it is now relatively easy for property owners to adapt their premises for different uses, without applying for planning permission. So shops and office space can be repurposed to, say, flats, as long as the developer meets certain criteria. “From my conversations with different developers, the drive is now to convert to residential,” Dillon-Robinson says. “So now we’re seeing where it would once have been prime office space, [there’s] a drive for people to live in city centres.”

Last year, John Lewis announced plans to transform a warehouse and some of its stores into flats, as part of a £500m joint venture with the investment group abrdn (surely the apotheosis of the middle-class existence would be moving into an old Waitrose?); there has been speculation, too, that Canary Wharf’s offices might be transformed into residential properties in the future. Increasing city centre housing is certainly one way of making an urban centre come alive again. For Dillon-Robinson, this can be “a real positive”, but she cautions that it can “cause quite a dichotomy”, as nightlife venues can be forced out as a result.

And what if that housing is prohibitively expensive? “If cities are just playgrounds for the wealthy, then that’s not sustainable,” Dr Jonathan Clarke notes. “A lot of the arguments against this concept are about the risk of gentrification and ghettoisation,” Dillon-Robinson explains. “That is always seen as a potential risk – that when you regenerate an area, you lose that diversity of people if you don’t have homes for families, spaces for children or older people.” It’s important to balance “driving people to the city centre and making sure their neighbourhoods are also a positive space”, she adds.

So while the more attention-grabbing developments are important in luring us back to the city, it’s equally vital to sort out the fundamentals at the same time: “high-quality public realm [publicly owned streets, buildings and open spaces], places that are walkable and feel safe”, as Kat Hanna puts it. That might look like an emphasis on pedestrianisation, or a new focus on developing urban parks. “Places that work for a range of people are just as important as having a few art galleries or socialising spaces,” she says. Dillon-Robinson agrees. “For a city to be vibrant and inclusive, it means that we need to have spaces for everybody.”