Not another clone town campaign!
Town & Country Planning, July/August 2005
It isn’t every day that you’re involved with a media story related to planning to hits every serious newspaper and every serious radio feature programme as well.
Given that I was involved on the fringes of the ‘Clone Town Britain’ story, it seemed a pity not to record the fact, though I represented the idea mainly on such mainstream press outlets as Radio Solent and Radio Essex.
But you know when even big guns like Max Hastings get rolled out to write full-page features on the subject of how every high street in Britain is starting to look the same, that you have struck a chord with the public.
The Clone Town campaign actually began last summer, with almost identical coverage. In fact, the environment correspondent of one national newspaper suggested that the great thing about a Clone story was that you could do it the same over and over again.
The story was undoubtedly enhanced when my colleague Andrew Simms discussed the idea on the Today programme, by having a spokesman for the British Retail Association shouting ‘rubbish!’ manically from the other end of whatever studio line he had been exiled to.
It is amazing in these days of spin how many organisations still fall for that one.
Apart from the postbag from people around the country – nearly all of it heavily in support of the campaign – the most surprising result came from the headline in the Financial Times, that our objective was to break up Tesco.
The next thing we knew was the Office of Fair Trading calling up and asking to fix a meeting to discuss the idea. And now we have heard since then that Tesco has captured 30 per cent of the grocery market, that should come as no surprise.
My main involvement in all this was defending the campaign in the Your and Yours studio – not so much against the RTPI’s Kelvin Macdonald and a retail consultant, but the taped interviews with shoppers in Exeter explaining that they just loved their town centre as it was.
You see, of all the surveys sent in to us, Exeter was the most cloned of all.
This did possibly give an unfair impression. If we had had surveys sent in from Reading, for example, they would have been pushed off their perch.
We heard a great deal about the lovely small shops on Exeter’s side streets. But the point wasn’t so much about the static situation, but the trend. And five years ago, those small shops were on the high street too. In five year’s time, well who knows…
The point is that there is a process going on here, and for all the talk about a new localism – this process is taking us in precisely the opposite direction: towards bland identikit towns where the economic and buying decisions are taken by distant and faceless senior buyers, and where shopkeeper jobs have been replaced by low-paid check-out staff.
We know where this trend is heading, because we can see the dead town centres in the USA, where there is incidentally 38 square feet of retail space per person – much of it abandoned.
And for every square foot, there is an associated three square foot of car park – also abandoned.
There are, for example, a staggering 350 empty Wal-mart stores. Having closed down all the surrounding shops, they then moved out themselves to a new generation of ‘Supercenters’.
All this is a kind of death, and the very opposite of localism. Yet it is amazing how complacent those in authority are about it
