Places worth visiting

British town centres have changed four times.

They began as strongholds. Walls, a gate, somewhere to run when raiders came. Then they became markets – the wool exchange, the corn hall, the cattle auction, places where things were bought in bulk and sold on. Then the mills and factories arrived, and the town became where the work was. And then, for a while, town was where you went shopping.

Four transitions. Each one deliberate. Somebody decided to pull down the walls, build the market hall, lay the tram tracks, pedestrianise the high street.

Now look how short the last phase was. The town centre as a place you mainly go to buy things is a post-war invention. The version we are nostalgic for – Saturday in town, the department store, the record shop – lasted about sixty years. We are mourning the briefest chapter in a thousand years of British urban history as though it were the natural order of things, and waiting for it to come back.

It isn’t coming back. That is not the problem. The problem is that this is the first change nobody is steering.

What can’t be delivered

“Almost everything a town centre used to do can now be done from a warehouse or a screen. Buy the thing, book the thing, watch the thing. One exception. You can’t order company.”

That is what a place is still uniquely good at, and it is not a small thing. Loneliness is a medical condition with a body count. Sitting still is another. Both of them cost the NHS money that never appears in any council’s leisure budget, which is why the leisure budget is the first thing cut.

 So the question for every town in Britain is simple. When the shops have gone, what reason is there to walk into town?

The arithmetic of sharing

Here is the part that ought to appeal to anyone who likes value for money.

A swimming pool with an empty lane costs no less than a full one. A library with an empty chair, a park with an empty bench, a bandstand on a Tuesday afternoon. The cost of one more person using any of them is close to nothing. Charging admission doesn’t ration a scarce resource. It just keeps people out of something we have already built and are already paying for.

Which is why one municipal pool beats ten thousand gym memberships, and one good library beats ten thousand private book collections. Not because sharing is morally superior. Because it’s cheaper and it’s better.

We’re proposing energy at cost. Housing at cost. This is the same argument for leisure: it’s a social good. Tool libraries. Rehearsal rooms. A sewing machine and someone who can teach you to use it. A workshop with a bench and a vice, where a fourteen-year-old finds out she likes making things, four years before anyone offers her an apprenticeship.¹

Trees, pavements and hanging baskets

And then there is the state of the place.

The average British town has tree cover of about 18%. The European average is around 30%. Trees provide shade in a heatwave, drainage in a downpour, and are the difference between a street you walk along and one you hurry down.²

We should have pavements that aren’t trip hazards. Benches. Public toilets that are open. Bins that get emptied. Somewhere to sit that doesn’t require you to buy a coffee.

“Our cities used to be uplifting. We had hanging baskets. Nobody has ever seriously argued that hanging baskets are a Marxist-Leninist plot.”

This is where “we can’t afford it” ends up. Not a debate about the size of the state. A country being told it cannot run to some flowers and a level paving slab.

A bench, a tree and a working public toilet are not decoration. They are the difference between a high street somebody walks down and one that has three empty units and a vape shop. Footfall is the whole business model of a small shop or cafe. A high street nobody walks down is a high street nobody trades on.

Why it went wrong last time

One honest warning, because we have built these things before and then watched them rot.

The building is the easy part. But we have stopped staffing things. Around five hundred public swimming pools have closed since 2010, almost half of them in the last five years, and three in five of the survivors are beyond their design life or need major work. Something like eight hundred libraries have gone the same way, with hundreds more on reduced hours.³

One group has been quietly removed from British public life, and we complain about them constantly. Youth work is not childcare and it is not crime prevention, though it reduces the need for both. Spending is down 76% in real terms.

So teenagers stand around outside the shops, because there is nowhere else that is warm and doesn’t require you to buy something. And we respond by designing benches they can’t lie on and playing high-frequency tones to move them along.

A youth club is somewhere to go where there’s an adult who is not your parent or your teacher and who’ll ask you how you’re getting on without telling you to do your homework. That is difficult to put on a spreadsheet, which is precisely why it was cut first.⁴

Cuts have a visible effect. Report a fly-tip and it will usually go. Report the rats and someone comes. The system mostly works and the people in it work hard. But a mattress on the verge is visible for four days, and the crew that takes it away is visible for four minutes at eight in the morning, when you are somewhere else. So the mess is the evidence and the fix isn’t seen.

What actually breaks a public space is not vandals. It’s absence.

The park keeper, the librarian, the pool attendant, the caretaker on the door – we cut them because they were revenue spending and revenue spending is where the axe falls. Then the place got wrecked, and we concluded that people can’t have nice things.

People can have nice things. Somebody has to be there.

That makes this chapter different from the rest of the report. Everything else here is about capital – building assets that pay for themselves over decades. This is about running costs, which no clever financing structure fixes. It has to be paid for out of what the state raises each year, which is why the tax and monetary arguments in Section 4 matter as much as the investment ones.⁵

The deal

The housing chapter asked people to live closer together. This is the other half of that bargain.

A smaller garden is no loss if the park over the road is superb. A smaller flat is fine if it’s cheap and warm, the library is well stocked, the pool is free and there is somewhere to take the kids on a wet Sunday. Density without public luxury is just squeezing people in. With it, it is how the best cities in Europe have lived for two hundred years.

That is the trade, and it is a good one. We used to know it. Every Victorian corporation that built a library, a bathhouse and a park in the same decade knew it, in towns considerably poorer than ours.e.”