Why Berlin is better than London

A visit to the German capital last week was instructive. It came around three months after the previous visit and three months prior to that I had passed a four-day sojourn taking part in the World Retail Congress.

The point is that on each visit there was something, in fact several things, new to look at. Shops seemed to have bloomed as quickly as the changing of the seasons and the long drought that has characterised spring in the south of England was nowhere to be seen, at least as far as retail novelty was concerned.

In fairness, the great bulk of this is what might politely be termed ‘low-cost’, rough luxe or any other term you might choose to indicate that a shopfit looks deliberately beaten-up, even though it houses expensive stock (think Urban Outfitters or Anthropologie writ large across a city).

Most of the new was spacious, with names such as Happy Shop, Shusta Salon (well, the upstairs bit anyway) and Gestalten Verlag, a gallery meets publishing house retail enterprise. And that’s why Berlin is such a happy hunting ground for retail inspiration.

This is a big, big city. Its footprint is almost the same as London’s, yet just a third of the population inhabits the same area. The result is that rents are cheap and therefore the risk involved in setting up a new shop is far lower than it would be when signing for similar centrally located premises in London.

The plain fact is that retail rents in the UK restrict novelty. While some landlords have undoubtedly attempted to overcome this by encouraging the pop-up phenomenon that plugs the gaps in depleted schemes, this is nothing like what is happening in Berlin.

Anything that appears in London is the outcome of very, very careful consideration and it is usually only the biggest brands that can afford to take the plunge….which is a shame because diversity is a plus. A shame too because, the UK still retains one of the world’s most vibrant retail design industries, but which increasingly finds few outlets for its work in this country.

There are, naturally, exceptions, but it’s hard not to be impressed by Berlin and a mite disappointed by what’s happening in London currently.