William Henry Smith was a great figure of both the high street and the Conservative Party.
The railway boom allowed him to expand his family’s book business by opening shops and stations. His fortune secured, he turned to politics, serving in several cabinet roles through the late 19th century. Gilbert and Sullivan lampooned his ascent to First Sea Lord in HMS Pinafore, but his real fame was the enduring presence of WHSmith on our high street.
Such fame has now waned.
Last year, the retailer’s owners sold off the high street shops. WHSmith remains a brand at airports and train stations. Elsewhere, it was replaced with the lacklustre imitation, TG Jones. Now, a deep restructuring of the businesses suggests that up to 150 of those will close. If William Henry were transported to the present day, he’d be just as disappointed in the fate of his business as in the state of his party.
The tale of WHSmith is an oft-repeated one. Long-standing brands have suffered the fate of the declining high street. Many have kicked between restructures, new owners and rebrands before eventually succumbing to oblivion. Woolworths was a victim of the financial crisis; others, from Topshop to JJB Sports to Wilko, have followed in its wake. Alongside them, many independent and small shops have struggled to keep up with changing times and have fallen away.
For politicians, the fate of the high street is a prominent issue.
In many of today’s local elections, it will play a role. People hate a town centre marked by empty frontages or by big brands replaced with low-rent offerings. In the past, when I’ve stood as a candidate, frustration at the expansion of bookmakers’ and fast-food joints in place of almost anything else was a common theme on the doorstep. Research has also shown that the rise of populist parties and voting patterns correlates with the rates of dereliction in town centres. Empty high streets are a sign of decline, and make people feel frustrated at the state of their local area. Declining towns produce alienation, and that’s a political problem.
There is a certain hypocrisy here.
Or at least a clash between professed and revealed preferences.
High streets have suffered primarily due to changes in shopper behaviour. For decades, we have forsaken them for cheaper and more convenient alternatives. First came supermarkets, which pulled us away from traditional food shops, then out-of-town retail, and finally the internet. Each time, shoppers voted with their feet and their wallets.
However much voters lament the decline of the high street, the one thing they won’t do to save it is shop there.
As Conservatives, this presents a dilemma that cuts to the heart of our political position. The market signal is clear. The high street provides a poorer, more expensive service. WHSmith was emblematic of this – a brand that had become famous for being both overpriced and grim to visit. Where high streets have continued to flourish, it is generally because they attract people prepared to pay a premium for something special, whether in goods or experiences. Any policy solution must acknowledge this.
Debates have raged for years about how to reverse the decline of the high street. Proposed solutions have included taxes on online shopping or changes in business rates to penalise out-of-town warehouses. But most of them flounder on a fundamental point: those costs are passed on to the shopper. Changing behaviour away from big shops and online orders ultimately means putting a hand on the scale of free choice and probably involves raising prices.
A communitarian approach accepts that.
A more Tory line of thinking would hold that there are some things that the market can’t be left to provide, and the intangibles of the high street are important enough to merit such intervention. Retail parks don’t produce community spirit. Online orders don’t foster a sense of belonging. But breaking their hold over shoppers requires more than just emotional appeals about lost high streets. It requires either building a sufficiently compelling alternative or interfering in the market to shape shoppers’ behaviour. Realistically, saving the high street requires the flexing of state power.
The alternative is accepting the reality that high street shopping is not coming back.
That leads to harder conversations about how we repurpose town centre spaces. With shoppers going elsewhere, it probably means redeveloping high streets into housing and providing community spaces. More housing density around town centres tends to bring more footfall, even if it can’t entirely reverse the structural shift away from retail. More shared areas can also restore the high street as a social space.
For decades, politicians have provided warm words on the high street without confronting the real dilemma. Shops are struggling when people don’t want to frequent them. The high street hasn’t been helped by some of the policy decisions of the past few years, but the biggest problem has been shifting lifestyles and preferences. Punters have prioritised price and convenience in ways traditional stores can’t keep up with, even while saying they want a vibrant high street. Responding to that either requires real intervention and telling people they can’t always have what they want, or else innovating and transforming spaces.
William Henry Smith was, after all, an innovator. When the railways emerged, he didn’t lament them taking business away from high street shops. He moved towards where the customers were. When faced with similar changes today, there are only two real options – standing in the way of it, or helping to adapt to it. Trying to do both often ends up with doing nothing, or half measures that neither solve nor respond to the problem. Politicians hand-wringing about the decline of the high street have to pick one.
If the high street is to remain in its late 20th-century form, and succeed, then the state has to push back against the market pressures that developed what we have now. That’s a major intervention, which pushes against the way people live their lives. As Conservatives, we ought to be very wary of it. The alternative, however, is to understand which elements of the high street serve a greater, more community-focused purpose and to find ways to preserve them regardless of how people shop. As the party itself considers rebuilding its identity, choosing among these things honestly would be a start.