Everyone always says how ugly Birmingham is but its easy to forget that it has some of the UK’s finest civic architecture, and we were privileged today to hold our future of the high street conference in the splendid Victorian setting of the city’s Council House. I remember studying Joseph Chamberlain’s work in Birmingham for my history A Level (although admittedly vaguely) and I think we could do with a few more visionary city politicians like him today.

The event was very good, with some really healthy debate. It was kicked off by Ottakars founder turned Tory MP Philip Dunne, who gave a speech which was half party political broadcast and half real retail wisdom. He was quite positive about the potential for the UK’s high street’s to reinvent themselves (with the help of a Tory government of course) but admitted he wouldn’t set up a book chain today.

The star of the show for me was Boots boss Alex Gourlay, who in his very understated way is emerging as a real statesman of the industry. Unsurprisingly given his 3,000-odd stores Alex is quite vexed about the future of the high street and went further than any big retailer I’ve heard for a long time in quite passionately calling for Upward Only Rent Reviews to be outlawed and the Supplementary Business Rate to be scrapped.

Other highlights were a terrific presentation on the success of the BID in Plymouth, which was quite compelling and a real case study in how to win over sceptical retailers to working with the local authority, and a presentation from Tesco’s wonderfully idiosyncratic Lucy Neville-Rolfe.

You might consider it counter-intuitive for Tesco to appear at a conference to talk about how it’s helping the high street but Lucy swept all objections before her and made a quite convincing case for what a positive role it plays, even seeming to have won over the new guy from indies group the BSSA, who surprised me by agreeing that having Tesco in town is good for indies.

Lucy finished on a very positive note, saying the high street will still have a big role in 2020 whatever technological innovations transform retail in the meantime, but Alex struck a more cautious tone and I’m inclined to agree with him. I think post-election the industry is going to need to put in a concerted effort to make sure that the new government is fully aware of the challenges facing town centres, and demand some very interventionist action. Jeremy Collins of John Lewis harked back to Michael Heseltine’s efforts to revive cities in the 80s - that might not be a bad place to start.

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