Time for independents day

I’ve just come back from my holidays, during which I spent a few days in Buenos Aires. Do you know what the best thing was about the shops there? I’d never heard of any of them.

The city was full of stores, almost none of them from the usual parade of international brands. Yet they showed imagination, style and quality to match any of those big brands. It was fantastically refreshing. I bought things I didn’t really want, because I loved the shops so much.

Now that I’m back here, I’m struck by how much of that flair we have lost. Of course there are still some great independent shops here and there in the UK, but they have become a relative rarity. For many years we have all seen the gradual colonisation of retailing by multiples.

And now that is being compounded by another thing which is becoming all too evident - the gradual shrinking of the retail world.

Look at the high streets of smaller market towns. Take away the charity shops, estate agents and coffee shops, and what have you left? A scattering of multiples and maybe a couple of supermarket convenience formats.

It’s the same in most suburbs of London and other big cities. These smaller high streets are dying.

The retail business is inexorably being sucked into the large shopping centres and major high streets. Shopping mall floorspace has risen dramatically in recent years, with most people now within easy travelling distance of one or more major centres.

The malls’ combination of good space, weather protection, ample parking, broad range of support facilities and, of course, critical mass of the big retailers in large shop units is understandably very attractive to shoppers. And so, by degrees, these centres are leeching customers away from traditional high streets.

Let me not omit supermarkets. Their slice of the retail pie has also grown relentlessly and, although they are returning to town centres with express formats, this does not remotely compensate for the high street’s loss of business to out-of-town superstores. All the big operators have plans for lots more of those, so the trajectory is clear.

Online shopping is doing its part, too, although as yet it is not on the scale of these other forces.

Bit by bit, the retail business is abandoning its traditional home on the high street and concentrating more and more in specialised locations elsewhere. And in those locations it is much harder for new concepts with no financial covenant to get started.

I am not about to argue for turning back the clock but, as an industry, are we just going to allow this to happen?

Why don’t we try to lead a renaissance of these streets by finding a way to encourage retail innovation there? Rent and rates remissions, employment subsidies and even capital grants have elsewhere been used very effectively to regenerate old docks, factories and warehouses. Ours is a wonderfully creative business. Wouldn’t it be brilliant to give a whole new generation of shops a head start by empowering them to regenerate our high streets?

Simon Burke is chairman of Superquinn