De-centring the town: have we reached the point of no return?

By John Hubbard

John is a retired English teacher who has had a lifelong interest in architecture. He currently volunteers for the National Trust as a guide at Thomas Hardy’s cottage in Dorset. In this article, he suggests that we have the capacity to reshape our town centres in ways that are interesting, attractive, and environmentally-friendly.

Nearly all of us have had the experience of travelling on ring roads or bypasses and encountering the insistent repetition of signs marked ‘Town Centre’ at each junction. It feels like something of a plea, a wish to prove wrong the famous adage from a well-known Two Ronnies sketch in which a man from the ministry proudly declares the benefits of all these new roads being that you can ‘drive all day without going anywhere’. Now, of course, with SatNav you can also drive all day without having the faintest idea of where you haven’t been as well.

One of the side-effects of the road system as we have it today is to instil an outlook which regards towns and cities as obstacles to be avoided, rather than desirable destinations; an outlook that is exactly the reverse of the attitude that prevailed in the early days of popular motoring, which produced a delighted reaction to the easy discovery of so many newly-accessible towns and cities and a sentimental relish of their local architecture and history. HV Morton’s In Search of England (1927) and the Shell Guides with which John Betjeman was so closely associated are cases in point.

Of course, a centre implies a focal point, which we envisage as lying at the heart of a circle with a number of radii converging on it. Towns and cities are not as regular as that, but all old settlements have road systems which converge on points central to commerce or religious and social functions. The crossings of many open onto market places or squares that still function to this day, either as shopping centres or locations for weekly or twice-weekly gatherings of itinerant vendors of food, clothes and household items. Visitors to France in particular will be aware of the plenitude of stalls you can encounter on market day – three or four fishmongers, sellers of cheeses and charcuterie, innumerable greengrocers and farmers and market gardeners coming in from the neighbouring countryside to sell honey and rarer vegetables and fruits. Vendors which are well-established in high street shops such as bakers, pâtissiers and butchers are less well represented, but hardware sellers and ironmongers as well as clothiers and haberdashers abound. In Orange, a historic town about 20 kilometres to the north of Avignon, nearly every commercial street and square in the centre is lined with stalls on Wednesdays, ready for sales from 7am — and gone by two in the afternoon. In Arles, the broad boulevard around the edge of the old city walls is entirely occupied in similar fashion, with the local authority sweeping up and hosing down in the hours that follow.

South side of the market square. Blandford's uniformity of style was made possible by a devastating fire in the town in June 1731. (Photo by the author.)

North and East sides of the Market Square, Blandford, Dorset, featuring the Town Hall and Corn Exchange building. (Photo by author.)

Markets in England are perhaps more modest, but still emphatic enough to require road closures in the High Street — as in Lymington, Hampshire, every Saturday — or the suspension of parking where it has come to fill market places as in Blandford, Dorset. One thing you also find in these High Street and marketing areas is evidence of numerous old coaching inns, indicative of a time when major roads and express connecting transport were brought right to the very heart of towns and cities. In Blandford, in testimony to the pace of travel, the inn was called The Greyhound, and it still stands opposite the Corn Exchange and Town Hall in a square dignified to the east by the elegant church, and a uniformity of style made possible by a devastating fire in the town in June 1731: civic buildings, transport hubs, commercial activity all gathered together in an emphatic centre.

The first de-centring of the town came, though, with an institution that was famous for improving connection, causing an influx of potential buyers and visitors: the railway. Because town authorities were inevitably reluctant to sacrifice established buildings to make way for something acknowledged to be, if efficient, both noisy and dirty, railway stations were often built on the very edges of existing towns. If you want to know how far a settlement had reached by the 1860s or 1870s, look for its station.

In London and some bold industrial cities — or where geography demanded it — people were prepared to take radical decisions. For example, during his time as an architect in the capital, Thomas Hardy helped supervise the tactful removal of a graveyard to allow for the expansion of the Midland Railway lines. Edinburgh, too, shows the fruits of pragmatic city planning: the amalgamation of its original three stations into one, lying low in the central valley at the very heart of the city, has long benefited its citizens.

Naturally, the areas around railway stations adapted to the needs of travellers, and the railway companies often played a role in this development. In large towns, they built hotels — which explains why a south coast town such as Bournemouth once had a Midland Hotel adjacent to the old terminus of the line from Birmingham. In Southampton, too, the grand South Western Hotel, positioned between the central station and the lines to the docks, consolidated that company’s hold on the services it provided to luxury travellers bound for the port. However, even though there was a growth of smaller commercial districts, there was not enough ‘pull’ to damage town centres, as the economy revolved around getting people into the town itself. It still does, and you will be aware of streams of cabs still lining up outside stations to meet scheduled trains and, increasingly, the growth of transport hubs in such areas to co-ordinate bus and coach services.

However, the rapid growth of car ownership and population in the late twentieth century called for some radical solutions if business and tourism were not to be strangled by inadequate parking. At the same time, the sense that existing commercial premises no longer provided enough space or flexibility for expanding businesses became pressing, especially in centres without large department stores. These two pressures — for better parking and for more expansive retail space — have consistently driven changes that either inflicted considerable aesthetic damage or so de-centred the town as to harm its traditional high street, sometimes beyond repair.

On the one hand, there was a belief that commercial activity was best served by bringing large new shops and parking as close as possible to the existing centre. The enlargement of roads inevitably had a damaging effect on the existing landscape, and the multi-storey car park (an uncompromising and ugly structure at the best of times) added to the damage to the visual environment. A long campaign to demolish the famously ugly example in Portsmouth has recently proved successful, although we have never embraced the bold if expensive approach adopted on the continent of constructing car parks entirely underground, where the roofs are often historic squares, as in Avignon. High street extensions with larger, modern shops often brought benefits, especially by attracting well-known chain stores. But if there was no strong commercial anchor at the other end of the shopping area, this concentration of retail activity could shift the balance of trade — leaving older parts of the high street neglected or less viable.

This modern shopping development in Poole was directly linked to the old High Street, unlike Bournemouth's Castlepoint Shopping Centre which is 4 miles away from the centre. (Photo by author.)

On the other hand, distortions seem to have been accelerated when new shopping centres and their associated parking were so large that smaller shops and services began to migrate into them too, as they embraced premises of all sizes. However, many new shopping developments, as in Poole and Southampton, adopted the sensible approach of ensuring that the new centres were directly linked to the old high street areas. Nevertheless, a shift in the centre of gravity is clear if you remember what the old high streets were like in years past. It’s interesting, of course, that we unthinkingly use the phrase ‘shopping centre’ without being conscious that it has become something distinct from ‘town centre’.

Observation suggests that building one or two supermarkets close to a traditional high street causes minimal disruption — and may even support it, as seen in Christchurch, Chichester, and Sherborne. It is the large-scale developments built at a distance that tend to cause difficulties. In most such cases, the nature of the high street inevitably changes and independent retailers have to become more distinctive to grab their share of passing trade. But the downturn in personal shopping activity after Covid, coupled with the rise of the internet as a means of purchase, can cause a crisis for the de-centred town. This is particularly true of the town in which I live, Bournemouth, where a large shopping mall with a two-storey free car park built four miles away from the town square attracted every major retailer, such as Marks & Spencer, that had once been based in the heart of the town. This migration was only accelerated by rises in town centre parking charges, including the blanket imposition of on-street charges where none had existed before. The resulting commercial collapse in the town centre is causing a great deal of head-scratching among politicians locally. They realise that successful centres have a mixed offer and that you can’t simply dedicate an entire area to coffee-shops, pubs and restaurants or the night-time economy. We do more than eat and drink.

The penultimate wave of de-centring was the warehouse-based retail parks, which took advantage of the new roads. They were often associated with large products, and needed space to display their ever-expanding range of products for an ever-expanding population: DIY, beds, carpets, furniture, white goods and latterly computers and electronics. Car showrooms were never very far away. This was a different kind of shopping than that latterly done on the high street, which tended to focus on purchases you could fairly conveniently carry away in a bag. Large deliverables had tended to be the domain of the department stores, though they knew they hadn’t now enough space to make a convincing offer. Yet this type of retail park is still identifiably a part of a town or city, serving its regional community and adding to flourishing commercial activity on a scale that the old high street simply could not support.

The ultimate de-centring, for which nobody is responsible but ourselves, is outsourcing all of our purchasing to online global super-monopolies, whose records as employers are often undistinguished or cruel. I remember once finding a branded plastic bag containing a transparent straw-coloured liquid on our street. As I tipped it out in the gutter I was initially angry, until I realised that the schedule of delivery drivers was such that this was the only way they could urinate and meet their target for the day. I tend now to use such websites to research products and then take delight in buying them in my local shop.

Yet, we also need to remind ourselves that all is not lost: there are still shops, although fewer, and that we still shop and derive pleasure from doing so as a physical activity, in which we engage with real products in a usually attractive environment. What recent experience suggests to me is that retailers have not fully realised that their unique advantage lies in knowledgeable and experienced staff who can engage with the public in a warm and interested way. They cannot hope to survive with the self-service till and insufficiently trained and supervised part-time staff who regard the public as something of a nuisance.

I am sure that the town centre will survive. Over time it will contract, inevitably, if the planners have sufficient sense, towards a concentrated middle, and redundant premises will become housing, increasing the number of those who would wish to make most purchases on foot from their home. We are in a stage of transition and the speed of the changes has caught us unawares, but we have the capacity to reshape our towns in ways that are more interesting, attractive and environmentally friendly. We have reached a significant point, but with confidence and imagination, it need not be a point of no return.