FYI I’ve been wrangling with this article for weeks. It’s because it means talking about the elephant in the room.

Here’s the thing… I’ve been working on the premise that everyone wants to ‘save’ high streets and main streets and get them back to when they were ‘thriving’.

But maybe I got it all wrong. Maybe this is a natural process unfolding at an incredibly slow rate where suddenly we realise that centres of suburbs, towns and cities don’t look anything like they used to. And we miss how they used to look.

This is only one perspective and of course there is an equally powerful argument that we should preserve high streets and town centres.

The most persuasive thinking behind this perspective goes way beyond a strip of shops or a town centre, or even bricks and mortar retail in general.

It’s that more and more studies in the field of (mainly) sociology conclude that humans weren’t meant to live a life largely devoid of face-to-face interaction.

The design of our current brain is a reasonably old model – for the sake of argument let’s say 300,000 years old – and it has been honed over a much longer period than that to be very adaptable, which explains how the human race has not evolved, but adapted to many different ways of living.

But all of those ways – until now – have relied heavily on face-to-face interaction.

The world we live in now is moving very quickly away from this old fashioned model* to a much more remote way of communicating, which in turn is resulting in all time high levels of loneliness and depression. Sometimes the antidote is simply going out with friends or just taking a walk in the countryside – physical interactions as opposed to screen interactions.

So yes, many precincts where people used to go (in much larger numbers) are now looking a little faded. And that’s not just where you live – it’s right around the world.

An overseas trip

A month or so ago I went back to the UK to the city where I grew up, and had a wander around the centre, and out a little bit – walking no more than 500 metres from the very centre of the city.

The centre was pretty busy – as busy as I’d ever seen it when I was younger. But just a short walk away I found entire streets empty of any retail activity, or really any people at all that weren’t simply walking to or from home or the train station.

Empty retail areas that used to be cafes and restaurants – empty, the old cinema building – empty. What used to be busy pubs looked as if they were permanently closed. Even in the centre there was a small shopping precinct completely empty and only being used as a shortcut between streets.

The city described here is well known around the world – it’s a major tourist attraction. But it still suffers the same malaise. This city where I grew up and lived a big chunk of my life, is Oxford.

Interestingly the part of Oxford which had the most active nightlife when I went back – with cafés, restaurants, bars and shops – was out of town in an area that used to be a little run down. It’s now incredibly multicultural. It’s no more than a 25 minute walk from the centre of Oxford, but it’s the busiest spot in the whole city.

Government help?

Right now it’s difficult to know if this general downward trend in main street/high street precincts is reversible.

Sometimes local government (or sometimes higher up) decides to take the reins and do a big makeover. These often fail. They fail because it becomes a huge project and then there’s a lot of (let’s face it) political squabbling because there’s a huge cost involved and then nothing gets done at all. And sometimes, if something is done, it doesn’t help much! Doing things on a much smaller scale often works out a lot better and a lot quicker.

What do people want?

It’s not always the best idea to ‘ask people what they want’. A lot of the time they don’t know and it’s not their fault or their responsibility – everyone’s super busy and rely on the experts to come up with answers.

Steve Jobs didn’t ask people if they wanted an iPhone, because they’d never seen one. Henry Ford didn’t ask people if they wanted a car – he famously said they generally just wanted faster horses.

So – to backtrack a little – human beings still need physical spaces they can hang out in. It’s good for your mental health. These spaces are sometimes referred to in sociology as ‘third places’ ie not home or work. Third places are good for everyone. Now they just need to be (re)created.

Please let me know your thoughts.

*in tens and hundreds of years instead of over millennia

Main image by John Cameron on Unsplash