Lowri Griffiths on why she refuses to order everything online despite the evidence that the high street is not meeting her halfway, and what we lose if we stop trying

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

I bought a lamp on the high street last Saturday. This took forty-five minutes longer than it would have taken to order it online, cost approximately eight pounds more than the Amazon price for the equivalent item, required me to carry it home on the bus in a box that was poorly sized for bus travel, and involved a conversation with a shop assistant who was either deeply interested in lamp aesthetics or paid to perform that interest, and I genuinely could not tell which. I am recording this transaction here because it is the kind of transaction whose existence I believe in as a matter of civic principle and whose specific execution I found mildly exhausting, and I think the gap between those two things is the entire situation of the London high street in miniature.

What the High Street Is

The argument for the high street is not primarily economic, because the economic argument is difficult to make when a website delivers the same item cheaper to your door within twenty-four hours. The argument is civic and social: high streets are where communities happen. They are where you run into people accidentally, where you make the unplanned purchase that turns out to be the thing you needed, where the independent bookshop owner recommends a novel that changes how you think about something, where the butcher tells you how to cook the cut you bought in a way that no algorithm has ever anticipated you would need to know. They are also where the evidence of urban life is legible in a way that online shopping makes invisible: who is moving in, what businesses the neighbourhood can sustain, what the taste and economics of the community look like when expressed in commercial decisions.

The North London high streets I use — Crouch End’s Broadway, the stretch of Green Lanes that I walk when I am going to see friends in Harringay, the Archway Road when I am in a mood for a different kind of afternoon — tell me things about my city that I could not learn from a browser. They tell me that the Nigerian restaurant on the corner is expanding, which is good news. That the independent record shop has added a wall of second-hand vinyl, which is excellent news. That there is a new estate agents where the stationery shop was, which is bad news delivered in the specific way of being bad news for the high street while also being evidence that someone is doing well enough economically to need to move, which is complicated news. High streets are where economics becomes local and legible and human.

The Ways the High Street Is Failing Me

I want to be honest about the ways the high street is not meeting me halfway, because a defence of the high street that pretends its problems are externally imposed would be dishonest. The shops close too early. I finish work at six and I have approximately forty-five minutes in which to do high street shopping before everything shuts, which is forty-five minutes during which the high street is also at its most crowded, because everyone else who works until six has the same forty-five minutes. The parking, if you drive, is either expensive or impossible. The payment systems are inconsistent in ways that should not be a problem in 2025 but remain one. The range is narrower than online for anything beyond the everyday. And the specific thing I wanted — the lamp, the particular book, the type of coffee I now prefer — is frequently not there, which sends me online after all, having expended the effort of going to the high street and learning that the high street does not have it.

I am still going to buy from the high street, because I believe the civic case for it even when the practical case is thin and the lamp case was mildly exhausting. But the high street that I am defending would serve its defenders better if it solved the closing time problem, which is primarily a staffing economics problem that the government could help with through business rate relief for extended hours. It would serve its defenders better if it solved the range problem, which is partly a matter of curation — the high streets that have survived and thrived tend to have a distinctive identity and complementary mix of businesses — and partly a matter of commercial landlord behaviour that keeps rents high enough to exclude the independent operators who create that identity. The high street is worth defending. It would be easier to defend if it were trying a bit harder to deserve the defence. I say this as someone who just carried a lamp home on the bus. I am not above a little reciprocal effort.

The business rates system is the specific structural mechanism that does most damage to the high street, and it is worth naming directly because it is the one lever that government has most direct control over and has most consistently failed to pull in the direction that would help. Business rates in the UK are calculated on the rental value of commercial property, which means that properties in high-demand locations — the London high streets that are most important to preserve as commercial and community assets — face the highest rates regardless of the profitability of the businesses occupying them. An independent bookshop on the Crouch End Broadway pays rates calculated on the same property value as a bank branch or a chain coffee shop, despite having a significantly lower revenue-per-square-foot. The result is that the independent operators who create the distinctive character that makes high streets worth visiting are systematically disadvantaged relative to the chains who can absorb the fixed cost across multiple locations. The government’s reforms to business rates have been incremental rather than structural, extending relief to small businesses and retail while leaving the fundamental calculation methodology unchanged. A fundamental reform that assesses rates on actual turnover rather than property value would redistribute the burden from small independents to high-volume chains in a way that would meaningfully change the viability equation for independent operators. It would also face significant opposition from commercial property owners whose asset values are supported by the current system. This is the same political economy as housing. The people who benefit from the current system have more political power than the people who would benefit from changing it. Knowing this does not make the lamp cost less. It does make the defence of the high street feel like the right argument even when it is the harder one.

Lowri Griffiths writes from North London for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/lowri-griffiths.

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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/defence-london-high-street-terrible-time-still-worth-defending-lowri/