The GLA is set to launch a Challenge Fund in March to spark ‘cultural ideas and inventions’ across London’s High Streets in a bid to allow them to ‘thrive, not just survive’.

The fund was unveiled by Jamie Dean, Area Manager, North East Team, GLA as part of his presentation to NLA’s webinar this week: Evolving retail environments: from shopping centres to revitalising the high street.

Dean said the strategic enabling fund for ‘High Streets for All’ will call for exemplar projects in every borough, and the GLA will aim to take forward 10 pilot partnerships in the first year.

He showed examples of projects GLA has invested in before, such as a night-time enterprise pilot scheme in Walthamstow and The Spark project in Ilford in which the town hall was given over to new forms of artist workspace and a new food offering. ‘Community engagement will be at the heart of this and we will want to be testing and inviting people to fire up their imagination about what their high streets can be’, he said of what he hoped could be a ‘public imaginarium’. ‘A thriving retail environment is a thriving town centre, and the public and private sectors will need to form partnerships to directly intervene and work together with landlords, developers and London’s diverse communities to acquire and manage assets, experiment, and seed new uses including new types of retail if they want to shape town centres’.

Earlier, Dean had outlined the challenges for retail from the perspective of City Hall, not least because 90% of all Londoners live within 10 minutes of their local high streets, and the notion that they can be at the centre of a more sustainable neighbourhood. Shifting consumer behaviour over the last 15 years had led to a structural economic reshaping, not least the rise of internet shopping and changing work patterns. ‘We may well have to dramatically rethink our assessments around retail needs in the planning of town centres’, he said, and the proposed changes to permitted development rights could well reduce the stock of genuinely affordable spaces for entrepreneurs and social organisations where traditionally recovery gains a foothold. 

The Crown Estate, said Katerina Mercury, has been working to position itself as ‘a real estate provider as opposed to a traditional landlord’, creating long-term value across the West End. It has done this in part by attempting to ‘set itself apart from other shopping destinations’, improving public realm and creating places like UK’s first Apple Store and Microsoft’s Experience Centre, having recognised the rise in experiential retailing. But the ‘crisis’ retail finds itself in now was ‘truly catastrophic’ and in need of a great deal of rebuilding. ‘Necessity is the mother of invention and we really have no choice but to reinvent how retail property work together so that we can continue to be relevant’, she said. ‘Evolution has to be constant’, but one of the solutions was to create places people want to visit. ‘We're coming out of an age of experience into an age of belonging so connecting with people will be critical to success.' Although online retail has had a big effect, Mercury also noted that in some reports, 90% of all retail spend in the UK was influenced by having a store, and evidence from a pop-up store had shown that they achieved an uptake of 89% in online sales through having more of a profile.

Other speakers at the event included Argent senior asset manager Jessica Marsden-Smedley presenting £5bn Brent Cross Town and the lessons on creating a place that leaves a legacy for future generations it learned from King’s Cross, along with a vital mix, good public realm and high-quality architecture, within a ’15-minute town concept’. 

Finally, Stiff+ Trevillion director Mike Stiff said his practice said the planning system and its ability to keep pace with the changing landscape remained one of the key challenges. But the crucial component was perhaps the return of the office worker, given the multiplier of services on the high street for each member of staff – and Stiff + Trevillion’s workload on refurbishing and building new offices backs up Stiff’s belief that the office is far from dead. ‘We have never been busier’, he said.