High Street UK 2020

Nearby Alsager and Congleton were two of the small towns studied by a recent project called High Street UK 2020 (HSUK2020). It's a very clunky name for an academic-led ESRC project, which started in early 2014, one of a string of projects which have aimed to identify ways to boost retail on the UK High Street. HSUK2020's final papers appear to have been published in an academic journal at the back end of 2017, but Google News searches for "High Street UK 2020" and "HSUK2020" suggest almost no publicity in the establishment media. Although I should add that's not so unusual, for many of these Research Council-funded academic projects.

Anyway, I've only just caught up with it. Sadly their attempt to tackle Alsager doesn't seem to have been very enlightening for the academics...

"In Alsager, stakeholders agreed that future research and analysis regarding footfall, the catchment area, centre users’ behaviour and shopping preferences and residents’ perceptions of the town centre can reinforce the place branding process by elucidating town centre challenges and what type(s) of action is needed."

Erm... indeed. I think that translates into plain English as "We need more consultants". Still, they did manage to discover that the locals, albeit the sort likely to go to consultation meetings, have a view that...

"Alsager is a big village rather than a small town"

Incisive stuff. So far as I can tell that's about as far as they got in Alsager. My Google searches suggest there was no special report on Alsager, no razzmatazz press-release about how specific measures had boosted the town's retail trade. But the town, along with nearby Congleton, did input into this useful PDF which asked the people at the grassroots about what the expensive consultants' reports miss out. It's the most impressive 'output' I found from the project. Amazingly, "Health" is one of the factors previously overlooked...

"We could not find anything in the published literature relating the health of the catchment [of shoppers] to High Street performance"

Wow. What an indictment of 'experts'. Not one of them ever considered health as a factor. Not even once.

While skimming the HSUK2020's final papers, published in an academic journal for planners, I noted just a few useful nuggets. Such as confirmation that around 87% of consumers significantly change their retail habits during a big recession, and that those habits tend to stay changed for many years. For instance, some people go to coffee and tea shops more and linger longer, because that's relatively cheap, and then they 'window shop' more than they used to. Which to me suggests the question: How can you reach them in the coffee shops? Can a local shop offer a "we deliver to your table" service, co-ordinated by mobile phone GPS? Pop in the cafe for a coffee, and while you're waiting for it to be served, your phone's app pings the shop and an apprentice pops in with a smile and personally hands you the book you purchased online yesterday. Or your dry cleaning that you dropped off last week. That kind of thing. Timing would be everything, but it might be done reliably.

In terms of the HSUK2020 factors and advice it all seems to boil down to some obvious basics. I'm rewording here, summarising and translating from academic-speak and council-speak:

* understand the current identity of the town, and how it's changing.

* identify the many local barriers that your consultants may overlook.

* have a firm grasp of exactly how the town really functions, at the practical level.

* find out what the actual experience of visiting the town is, at a variety of levels.

* find out what the actual experience of selling in the town is, at a variety of levels.

* work out how to survey 'the unreachable' users of the town, including those who've stopped visiting and traders who are 'too busy to talk'.

* work out what the needs of local people are, and how to serve them better. That includes people who spend very little.

* crunch the Big Data, including data on what shopkeepers used to call 'passing trade', for trends and opportunities.

* encourage people in the town to see the ongoing global changes in retail markets and technologies as opportunities.

* expand the range of independent shops and non-retail uses.

* consult local people on any town re-branding, and especially on extensions in opening hours or evening trading.

* avoid the "fast and easy solutions" - a shiny new town logo, a simplistic appeal to big spenders, a new mailing brochure with some coupons at the back.

* help to refresh the grass-roots organisations that can encourage change in the town.

* establish a range of new partnerships, especially among those who can help break bureaucratic and other log-jams.

To which I'd add:

* get better staff and management in High St. retail. Grumpy staff are a huge factor in the current unattractiveness of the High St., and in pushing people toward online shopping. So much so that you wonder if some retailers do it deliberately, because you're more profitable to them online.

* pair humdrum sub-regional shop managers with people based in other areas, areas where the shops have already adapted to the latest retail trends.

* shrink the High St. area by moving all the outskirts shops inward, so the town centre is not strung out across two or three miles of walking (that's pock-marked by empty shops and grot). Convert the outskirts roads back to housing.

* bring all the shops together within a single website and/or Facebook group. Non-spammy, properly curated kind-of like a magazine, and full of 'added value' rather than PR fluff.

* add lots of really nice benches to sit on for free. With proper backs to them. Cafes may hate it, the police may frown and fret about drunks/druggies congregating, but the pensioners will adore you. If drunks/druggies are a real problem after noon, then work out ways to have benches put out only at certain times of day.

* have someone sprightly and eager who is dedicated to constantly going round picking up every scrap of litter and bit of broken glass, including along all footpath and cycleway approaches to the town centre.

* totally ban all chuggers and similar, don't just restrict them to certain days.

* remove 'plastic and tat' type shop-fronts, replace them with restored authentic shop-fronts if possible.

* rediscover and revive old long-lost traditions in the town. Who knew, for instance, that Congleton used to have a tradition of "ringing the chains"? In which the local monks would race around the town with strings of huge bells on them, to "announce to the town the arrival of the ‘wake’, an August holiday fair". Surely that could be imaginatively adapted for modern times, and revived?

The history of British allotments: a survey

I though it might be useful to place online a quick survey of some items on the history of British allotments:

A history of the allotment system in the Victorian period can be found in the Earl of Onslow's book Landlords and allotments: the history and present condition of the allotment systems (1886). This is free on Archive.org, and has Kindle and iPad editions.

A new academic book on the Victorian period is The Allotment Movement in England, 1793-1873 (2011). There is also a close examination using local Victorian sources, in the book Breaking New Ground: Nineteenth-Century Allotments from Local Sources (2010).

The history of allotments in Britain to the start of the First World War is briefly covered in the first chapter of the free Allotments for all; the story of a great movement (1918), which is available for free on Archive.org. Kindle and iPad versions are available. Most of the book is about the wartime experience.

A longer general survey can be found in the book The Allotment Chronicles: A Social History of Allotment Gardening (2006).

A short left-leaning academic summary paper is Allotment Gardens: A Reflection of History, Heritage, Community and Self (2011), which is free online. The paper has a rather timid bibliography, which doesn't include the two Archive.org books linked above. It also glosses over the right-wing roots of the 'Dig for Victory' campaign in the Second World War, opting to mention the left-leaning Quakers instead. For instance, the wartime Agriculture Minister responsible for instigating 'Dig for Victory' had been a member of the ultra right-wing English Mistery theoretical grouplet — on this see Dan Stone's "The Far Right and the Back-to-the-Land Movement" (2004).

A general book-length history of allotments in the Second World War can be found in Digging for Victory: Gardens and Gardening in Wartime Britain (2010).

The history of British allotments also features — with an anarchist slant — in Colin Ward's The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (1988) which has much to say about Council sell-offs in the 1960s and 1970s.

A more academic book that covers the 20th century in Britain is Denis Moran's The Allotment Movement in Britain (1990).

Some allotments societies have produced their own published histories, such as Gardeners' city: A history of the Letchworth Allotments & Horticultural Association, 1906-1996 (1996). Some cities have also produced history pamphlets, such as Lincoln's Allotments: A History (2008), or have included chapters on their city history in a book-length general survey — such as Allotments and small holdings in Oxfordshire (1917).

Allotments in Stoke-on-Trent: the statistics

I thought I'd do a quick bit of Web research on the statistics and figures for allotments in the city of Stoke-on-Trent, just for the online record. The sources are The Sentinel newspaper archives, Hansard, a 1988 Staffordshire University report, an Aug 2011 Freedom of Information request, and the MyTunstall hyperlocal website:

Stoke-on-Trent City Council officially knows of 80 allotment sites across the city [update: this was stated as 76 in the Sentinel on 5th April 2013], and these sites contain about 3,500 individual or half plots (some of which will be fallow, for various reasons). About 60 of these sites are Council-run [update: this was stated as 54 in the Sentinel on 5th April 2013], with a total figure of 1,350 Council plot tenants given in 2009. [Autonomous associations self-managed 22 of the Stoke sites at April 2013].

The average annual plot rent on a Council-administered site is said to be around £45 a year at the end of 2012. A comparable place like Barrow-in-Furness is currently in the process of jacking the annual rent up to £80.

Six disused allotment sites were re-opened by the Council in 2009/10, to cope with the demand caused by the recession which had caused the waiting list in the city to rise to 300. Despite these new sites, at 25th August 2011 the waiting-list across the whole city was still high at 248 (this figure excludes the 20 or so user-managed sites).

The Council stated at the end of summer 2011 they had no plans to open new allotments in the city, or to reclaim those that have become totally overgrown and disused (such as Rogerson's Meadow at the north end of Grange Park, Middleport). This is despite the continuing demand, as judged by the waiting list remaining high, and despite a Council's statutory duty to provide plots to those requesting them.

According to a FoI request, most people on the official waiting list in Stoke-on-Trent wait for somewhere under a year before getting a plot on a Council-run site, although on some very popular allotments there can be a wait of three years or more. There's a possibility that some popular sites have closed their waiting-lists, as it seems the Council permits this — some years ago The Sentinel reported (18th Aug 2008) that... "Some oversubscribed allotments in the city are closing waiting lists".

In 2009 The Sentinel reported that the Council was looking at selling off about six allotment sites, which had presumably become disused due to neglect. Allotments had been run-down under Council management in the 2000s — in 2009 the Council's own executive accepted a scrutiny panel -commissioned report which concluded that all the Council's...

"allotments had suffered over recent years from a lack of proper management". (Sentinel newspaper, 5th Jan 2009)

Given the Labour-run Council's record on running down assets that sit on land they wish to sell off to developers, the suspicion might be that some sites had been deliberately allowed to become run down. If so, then they would have been following a national trend. Nationally, allotment provision appears to have slumped under the Labour government. A 2006 academic report on allotments was commissioned by the Labour government from the University of Derby — although the damning report was then kept buried until 2011 when it was unearthed by the new government. This report found that the local Councils had together sold off around 50,000 individual plots to developers, and that allotment sites had fallen by... "nearly 800 between 1996 and 2006."

According to the MyTunstall website, allotments cover 185 acres of Stoke-on-Trent, and the City Council is said to be the third largest city provider of allotments in the UK. It's not known how many of the city's sites may have been sold to developers by Labour over the past 15 years or so, if any.

A 1988 study found that just 1.1% of Stoke-on-Trent's allotment holders were under 25, with 88.3% being over 40. The gender balance was then 92% male, 8% female. 49% of plot holders were either unemployed or retired. Plot holders rarely lived more than a mile from the plot they held. For more details see: George Kay's Allotment Gardens in Stoke-on-Trent (1988), issue 11 of Staffordshire University's academic journal Occasional Papers in Geography.

The abutting town of Newcastle-under-Lyme (geographically a seamless part of the Stoke city-district, although many there profess to loathe Stoke) has just seven allotment sites and 254 plots, according to a report in The Sentinel of Nov 2011. Reflecting the relatively affluent nature of the town, rents there are £53.10 a year. At Nov 2011 there was a huge waiting list there of 295, more than the entire available number of plots. Despite this obvious need, the Council was reportedly seeking to work out how their allotment costs... "can be reduced significantly or fully recovered" (Sentinel, 29th Nov 2011) and there appear to be no signs of new provision being planned. Newcastle's councillors appear to view allotments as cost-sinks, rather than as invaluable community assets. Given the running-cost figures I give at the end of this article, this seems an odd stance to take. Possibly the councillors are not in full possession of the financial details. At least the waiting list in Newcastle still appears to be open, at a time when many councils are simply closing their waiting lists due to the weight of demand, and in order to avoid negative publicity.

Further allotments in the Stoke city-region are provided under the auspices of lesser Councils in places such as Kidsgrove (£32 a year), and Lyme Valley. Allotments sites in the Staffordshire Moorlands (not including Leek) are private, and are not controlled by the Council — although they do manage Church Rd. Community Gardens which provides therapeutic gardening for the NHS and local children's centres. Leek Town Council controls seven allotment sites, with an annual plot rent of £20.

The average local per-plot running costs for a local Council are unknown. It seems likely site upkeep costs are lower in Stoke-on-Trent than elsewhere, due to the large number of sites and the economies of scale which that must bring. But one indication on running costs in a comparable northerly city region is to be found in a 2004 debate on allotments in the House of Commons (Hansard, 9th December 2004). The then-M.P. Ben Chapman said that in his constituency of Wirral South the annual cost of renting a plot was... "£25 a year against the council's upkeep costs of £31". Adjusting for inflation, that would put current Council upkeep costs at around £38.50 per plot. It therefore seems likely that, even taking into account pensioner discounts, the city of Stoke is at least breaking even by charging an average £45-50 a year rent.

By comparison, in Norwich the allotments in that city are reported to generate a profit of £27,540 on a plot rent of around £40. Despite this, rents there are now reportedly set to be increased to £70 a year in 2013/14 — which is expected to make the Council a profit of £70,107. It seems regrettable that some Councils are now starting to see their allotments as cash-cows and and doubling or even tripling prices. The economics of allotments are not simply in their cash income, but also in the wider social savings that arise from the incalculable health and well-being benefits that allotments give to men over 40. Raising allotment plot rates may bring a city some trifling profit, but the inadvertent long-term effect on male health could add many millions annually to the health and social care budget.