Good riddance to the High Streets in the UK

For many years now there have been numerous reports regarding the demise of the good ole English High Street and how it is suffering due to the closure of many of the shops, amongst several other things!


Local authorities are to blame for this common phenomenon, they have yellow lined everywhere that's possible to park a car, forcing drivers to use their overpriced car parks, also preventing them from stopping just outside the shops in order to 'pop-in' for one thing. Shopkeepers have then got to deal with the local authority increasing the 'rates' year upon year until it's no longer economically viable to trade there.


On top of that they(local councils) have favoured planning applications for out of town shopping developments so they can capitalise upon the council rates they charge the big supermarket companies. The big benefits are free parking and everything you want in one place.


The High Street is, in my opinion, finished. Our shopping habits have changed, we have been forced to change by the short-sightedness of local councils on the 'grab' as usual. There's no point trying to revive these now defunct shopping areas, it's time to move on, to find another use for the empty shops & offices. Homes perhaps?

Not wishing to be too nerdy but non-domestic rates are effectively set by the central government by way of the unified business rate multiplier, they are gathered by local councils as agents of central government and paid into a national pool from which they are redistributed by central government to Local Authorities. It's not the local council who puts up the rates on business in the High Street it's the Chancellor but conveniently it's the local council which takes the flak.

And in my childhood the corner shop was like going to see santa.

It was a few sweets or a slice of corned beef which sat on a slab on a

big wooden table.

Mr Allsop yes...The high street, the promenade on a sat morning where shopping

mingles with diluated coffee and muffins baked 5 weeks prior to consumption.

Assisted by the aditives.

Chains of restaurants are linked like sausages on a barbie....just waiting to sizzle and

pop.

NOT sure what will last and where it will go.

The sad shops which can only expect face lifts of graffiti and the customers

race along the roads in their fast cars towards the Westlife or other shopping cities

well designed for a faceless future.

I had my childhood on the corner of one with a tube station immediately under us to boot. By the time I left home in 1966 our High Street and others I knew in south west London were already dying. I was Saturday boy at a David Greig butcher for four years, there was a David Greig grocer adjoining it. They closed just before I left home. Up until then there had been four butchers' shops and umpteem grocers. There was a shop where Mr White and his son sliced cold meats, bacon and cheese for lengthy queues of housewives, I think there were around four bakers, on was big and had a cake shop separate to bread joined by a corridor, upstairs one ordered wedding cakes and such things, and undertaker, a large branch of the Co-op, two greengrocers, two newsagents, and old style tobacconist with boxes of pipe baccy mixes and cigars and two fishmongers. The rest I cannot recall, OK four pubs too. By 1966 the majority of those were already gone and shops that sold cheap rubbish imported from Hong Kong dominated the place. So do we wonder that they are all but dead and gone in 2012. James lived at the High Street end of Haydon's Road, I don't know when but I wonder how much of that he might have known at all he being a fair slice younger than me.