The bear, the rose, and the butterfly

How to deliver the overdue transformation of our dead and dying high streets.

Image credit: World Publishing Company (US) / Hamish Hamilton (UK)

Build the wall! Build the wall!

The Mayor of Chester, John Pemberton, had a major problem.

His predecessors had spent an enormous amount of money, over many years, building and maintaining the city’s walls and watchtowers. Since the time of the Roman occupation of Britain, they had provided an essential bulwark against marauding bandits and enemy forces during periods of strife and civil war.

By the time Pemberton came to power, in 1731, those threats were much diminished. Making the defensive perimeter provided by the walls functionally redundant, but still very expensive to maintain.

This put the Mayor in a difficult bind. Local traders resented having to pay a special “murage” tax for the upkeep of the walls. A ropemaker by trade, Pemberton understood the resistance of small businesspeople to unnecessary levies, and feared they would depart for lower taxes elsewhere.

Scrapping the charge would be popular with his core constituency, but would leave the walls to decay and eventually collapse.

There seemed to be no good options, until Pemberton looked at the problem from a fresh angle. He re-purposed the watchtowers and leased them out for meetings and social events.

This was an immediate success. The local trade guilds, who had been so unhappy with paying for the walls, became regular customers. This switch in purpose transformed the walls from a financial drain and political liability into a popular and profitable new venture.

Power and money

Pemberton’s dilemma offers an historic parallel to a problem faced by every town and city in England today. What should be done with dead and dying high streets that are every bit as redundant as Chester’s medieval walls?

This essay answers that question. It is split into three sections:

· The first part recaps the terminal problems facing high streets today.

· The second part establishes the core imperatives for delivering a programme of transformative change on our high streets.

· The third part sets out the practical elements of a change programme under two headings: power; and money.

This is the second of a two-part essay. You can read the first part, Death of the Salesmen, here.

Recap: Elegy is not strategy, there is no going back

If you have already read Death of the Salesmen, you can skip down to the next section, starting at ‘The bear’. If you haven’t, let me briefly recap the argument I made in part one.

The traditional high street model of mass-market goods and services being sold in physical spaces in urban centres is dead. It was made obsolete by three overlapping trends: developments in consumer tastes and habits; changes in urban planning; and advances in technology.

High streets, town centres, and shopping malls were already falling out of favour before online retail dealt the killer blow. The Covid-19 lockdown further accelerated the process of hollowing out.

The evidence for demise is all around us. Traditional high street brands have reduced their physical footprint, switched to e-commerce only, or gone out of business altogether. By summer 2023, around one in seven shops and one in five shopping centre units in the UK stood empty.

Even in the face of this abundance of evidence, we exist in a state of collective denial. As citizens and consumers, we have refused to accept that the old high street, that place of pocket-money fuelled excitement when we were kids, has gone forever.

That denial of an obvious truth stems from a feeling of guilt about our complicity in creating the problem. We could all reverse the decline of the high street with immediate effect. Instead of ordering new trainers on our shopping app, we could use the old pair to walk to the high street. But we don’t. Nor did we chuck away those smart phones to save the traditional phone box or boycott Netflix to save the video rental sector.

Our politicians are equally confused and reluctant to confront the harsh reality that the old high streets are dead and gone forever.

To give one example, the overall aim of Labour’s five-point plan is to “get our high streets thriving again”. This is a dead-end strategy. As Pete Buttigieg argued when he was running for the Democratic nomination for US president, “you can’t have an honest politics that revolves around the word ‘again’; you’ve got to prepare people for what’s changing”

We can comb through the stats for morsels of comfort. As Deloitte noted sardonically in their analysis of the survival rates of different types of high street business, “there is good news for kilt retailers and cheesemongers”. Sadly, even this was offset by disappointing data for the wig manufacturers and candle makers.

The problems on the high street are terminal. The future cannot be built on the resurgence of cheese production and wig manufacturing. There will be no retail revival, no matter how hard we may wish it.

Elegy is not strategy. Nostalgia is but reality’s drunken parent.

There is no going back; we can only move forward.

“The magnet comes before the container”

Part one ended on a note of optimism. There is a bright future for the places we currently call high streets, if we grasp the need to re-invent them.

To help us make that leap, let’s put the death of the high street in its proper context.

As Lewis Mumford put it in The City in History, urban centres exist because they serve a profound human need for interaction. That primal urge never goes away. What changes is how we shape our towns and cities to satisfy it; “the magnet comes before the container”.

The glory years of the high street arrived when shopping became a social activity, as much as a practical necessity, for the growing number of people who could afford leisure time. As the attraction of shopping faded, we have forged and found other ways to meet the human need for meeting and mingling.

That means we must re-purpose the spaces we currently call high streets for other uses. In part one, I drew on practical examples from the UK and beyond and outlined six ways that can happen:

· The giant step from the mass-market retail economy into the niche experiential economy.

· Narrowing down to a specialist service offer and / or catering to a particular section of society, such as people with dementia.

· The night shift, moving the focus of activity to evening and night-time activity.

· Public service specialisation, with a focus on providing a wide range of services, through partnerships of statutory agencies and the voluntary and community sector.

· Making a mall, by empowering a single owner and managing agent to buy-up all land and property on a high street, and then manage and promote it in the same way as a private mall.

· Returning to nature, by replacing most of the built environment with green spaces and water features, including ‘daylighting’ urban rivers that are currently hidden beneath our feet.

This was not an exclusive list. We can add three further options:

· Residential re-development, including specialist supported and sheltered accommodation.

· Workspace conversion, including traditional office space as well as light industrial uses, art studios, and flexible maker-spaces.

· Specialist student accommodation with accompanying amenities for sports, studying, and socialising.

· Advanced technology hubs, in towns that have a strong Higher Education presence, where the empty shops can be converted into the research labs and business incubators and accelerators for spin-off companies.

The problem is that these innovations are being developed and delivered despite the decision-making processes and funding arrangements that we have in place. Our system subsidises short-term, small-scale activity and disincentivises big, bold thinking. We need an entirely approach.

The next section sets out the core imperatives on which that approach should be based.

The bear

My approach to the re-purposing of high streets is based on three core imperatives. To deliver lasting change we need:

· As much market as possible; as much government as necessary.

· Local solutions developed through a devolved decision-making framework.

· Strong incentives for radical and far-sighted solutions.

Let’s start with the story of a horrendously short-sighted solution.

The Bear and the Gardener is an ancient Indian fable. It begins with a kindly gardener who rescues the imperilled animal from a potentially fatal snake attack. The grateful bear is indebted to his saviour and vows to prevent the man from coming to any harm.

On his first day on protection duty, the bear was angry that he was unable to shoo away a swarm of flies that were bothering the sleeping farmer. Frustrated at this failure, he went to a nearby forest to find a large rock to wield as a weapon.

On his return to the clearing where the man slept, he saw that the flies had gathered on the man’s brow. Raising the rock, the bear struck.

He sure killed the flies but, in the process, “made powder of the sleeping man’s skull”.

The story reminds us of the need for the state to be prudent and judicious in the exercise of its power. There are many example of governments, especially centralised administrations like we have in the UK, taking actions that are well-intentioned but deliver unintended results.

This essay makes the case for state-backed interventions to help solve the high streets crisis, on three grounds. The problem is urgent. It affects millions of people. And there is no sign that the market is coming up with solutions or has the capacity to drive the transformation that is needed.

However, that is not the same as arguing for extensive and ongoing state control of our high streets. We should adopt the attitude of the post-war Social Democrats in Germany, as they developed a Mittelweg between communism and free-market capitalism. Their credo was ‘So viel Markt wie möglich; so viel Staat wie nötig’ or ‘As much market as possible; as much government as necessary’.

It should be for the market, through the actions of entrepreneurs, businesses, and innovators, to create new services, sell products, and generate jobs on the high street. To enable that, from time to time, central government needs to intervene.

One of those times is now.

The rose

This takes us to the question of what type of state intervention is needed to help local partners to conjure new solutions. I draw a distinction between the train-track and the trellis to describe how places can develop.

Train-tracks only work if we want to impose on a place a fixed route with a teleological endpoint, like a train on a track heading toward a terminal station. This would clearly be an inappropriate and self-defeating strategy for the reinvention of high streets.

There is no single solution that can be applied everywhere; no endpoint to which all places should be guided. It is up to local partners to determine what future works best for them.

That is why, instead of train tracks, the state should put in place a trellis. A trellis offers a framework of structure and support around which climbing plants like roses can grow organically and find their own path toward sunlight.

As we’ll explore in the section on ‘Powers’, putting in place a trellis for the re-invention of high streets would mean central government handing over funding and decision-making responsibility to local Transformation Agencies.

The butterfly

While the path to a new future should be found and forged locally, the scale of change needs to be big, bold, and brave everywhere.

High streets need radical transformation. Not amelioration or minor improvements. They need a clear and compelling vision of the future. Not a portrait of the past with a glow-up filter to obscure the bits we don’t like.

The trellis should provide the structure for high streets to do what caterpillars do every day and all around us. They have not survived for tens of millions of years by changing into a slightly bigger, stronger, version of their old forms. They have survived by metamorphosing into entirely new creatures.

They create a chrysalis and transform into butterflies. If a creature as simple as a caterpillar, a “cylindrical, plant-digesting bag”, can turn into a new entity, it cannot be beyond us to turn a failing high street into a park or a sheltered housing scheme.

The chrysalis test should be the new standard by which we judge our level of civic ambition when it comes to reinventing the high streets. Support and funding should be contingent on local partners committing to reinvention.

Let’s now turn our attention to the structural changes that are needed to enable and incentivise similar metamorphoses on the high street.

Powers

This section spells out the practical elements of a change programme under two headings: power; and money.

Under each heading, I set out the problem, then make recommendations for empowering local agencies and equipping them with financials tools and levers they need to drive transformative change.

The power problem on the high street is straightforward. No single organisation has the legal power or institutional heft to develop and deliver a transformative plan. We need to equip dynamic local partnerships to make butterflies from bugs.

Local authorities have high-level vision-setting and planning responsibilities for high streets. However, their ability to deliver a vision is limited by a lack of resources and legal limits on their powers. Their room for manoeuvre is particularly restricted by the messy quilt-work of ownership rights that exist on a typical high street, with different individuals and organisations owning different buildings and parcels of land.

In terms of what is sold on the high street, councils also have to leave it to the market. People don’t like their town centres being overrun by vape shops and nail bars. But it is not up to the council to set an arbitrary bar on how many of each business should be allowed to trade on a shopping parade.

Many places have created surrogate bodies to catalyse and coordinate high street action, in the form of Town Teams and Business Improvement Districts. I have worked with many such bodies, and they bring welcome energy, insight, and focus.

They do not, however, address the fundamental power problem. Their role is to convene, to lobby, and to galvanise. They are not set up to formulate and effect change at the scale that is urgently needed.

Transformation Agencies

To fix the power problem, we need high street Transformation Agencies with the legal power, financial muscle, and human skills and capacity to deliver radical and lasting change.

The exact shape, structure, form, and membership of the Transformation Agency should be decided locally without over-prescription from central government.

We have a lot of evidence about what makes an effective place-making partnership: clear but accountable leadership; transparent ways of working; diverse and plural input to avoid group think and capture by a narrow clique.

It should be for local partners to draw on this evidence and apply what works to local circumstances. Where Towns Teams, Business Improvement Districts, and other bodies already exist, they can be adapted without the need to set up an entirely new structure.

The important thing is that they have a strategic role and a delivery capacity. This means the Agency should have its own:

· Remit to develop and deliver a vision that will pass the chrysalis test.

· Legal status.

· Bank account.

· Ability to raise and spend money.

· Power to sign contracts with delivery bodies.

Bodies with their own legal status and defined responsibilities are more likely to deliver lasting change than informal partnerships. To give two examples, Urban Development Corporations and Housing Action Trusts were given specific responsibilities and resources to deliver lasting change. They could be held to account publicly and their leadership could be challenged.

Like Housing Action Trusts or New Deal for Communities partnerships, the Transformation Agencies should have fixed lifespan of, for example, seven to ten years. This will ensure there is a timeline on delivery, while allowing enough time to embed sustained change.

‘I’ll bring the matches’

Within three to six months of formation, the Agency should produce:

· A transformative ten-year vision for the high street.

· A costed implementation plan for realising that vision.

· An investment prospectus to raise funds, from public and private sources, to fund delivery.

The vision should set out an ambitious, long-term programme of transformational change for the next decade and beyond. There should be a duty on the Agencies to engage local communities and stakeholders in developing the vision. What that means in practice should be determined locally.

The delivery plan will, of course, be a much more grounded document that contains business cases for each element of the overall package. But it should be infused with the same spirit of ambition.

One way in which central government, and HM Treasury in particular, can encourage ambition and innovation is to give Transformation Agencies the power to interpret and apply Green Book requirements in different ways.

The Green Book sets out the framework and criteria used by Treasury officials to assess public spending proposals. Many place leaders are frustrated that the application of the rules disqualifies their more ambitious long-term ideas.

Steve Rotheram, Metro Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, spoke for many at the end of 2023 when he complained that that he’d ‘like to see the Green Book burned’ and even offered to ‘bring the matches’.

Flexing the Green Book criteria would give would greater weighted values to outcomes related to health, wellbeing, community cohesion, and local pride. High streets could become policy laboratories and testing grounds for new ways of measuring what really matters to people.

Land and property assembly

After vision- and plan-making, the first practical step in many places will be land and property assembly as a prelude to transformation of the built environment.

In some cases, the focus will be retrofitting and re-purposing existing buildings. In other cases, such as turning a high street into a park or water feature, the task will be far more radical and involve extensive demolition and re-landscaping.

The biggest current barrier to redevelopment is the diffusion of land and property ownership. Most high streets are an assortment of freeholds and leaseholds, as well as commercial and domestic tenancy arrangements. The situation is made even more difficult when landowners are unknown, difficult to engage, or uncooperative.

In these circumstances, current legislation makes it both complex and costly to drive through a programme of redevelopment. Even modest proposals must go through a process of consultation and review in which there is huge scope for individuals to contest and appeal decisions.

We need legislative changes to make it easier for Transformation Agencies to buy up land and property and exercise greater power over the use of buildings. This can be done in two complementary ways.

Incentivising or requiring absent or negligent owners to sell. There are a few ways, within the existing framework, in which a Transformation Agency could deal with an absent or negligent owner. The first is simply to pay over and above the market price. This represents poor business in the short term, but a worthy investment in the long run. Another is to offer the landlord a share in future profits in exchange for their property, although that becomes more complicated if there are lots of landlords to be weighed into the deal, especially if they want different terms.

On the enforcement side, and thanks to the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023, councils have greater powers to force landlords to bring their properties back into use and let them to tenants. If the landlord does not cooperate, the local authority cannot effectively do this for them through a High Street Rental Auction.

These are welcome steps forward, but there is a case for local partners to have even greater powers. We should not interfere glibly with the protection of private property, but there is a case for publicly accountable agencies to be given additional powers to deal with absentee landlords whose costly negligence creates public hazards and higher taxes for the rest of us.

The task here would be to simplify and speed up the process through which a Transformation Agency can execute a Compulsory Purchase Order. As Power to Change recently highlighted: “Local authorities have some powers, through Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs), to bring vacant commercial properties back into use but can be reluctant to use them because of time and resource constraints.”

This can be achieved in three ways. The first is to reduce the time constraint by cutting back on the number of steps in the process, from the initial move of sending a ‘Requisition for information’ form to the owner, to successful completion of an order.

The second is to reduce the resource constraint by cutting the amount of compensation that is paid to absent and negligent landlords. The third is to increase the local capacity to carry out compulsory purchases, by creating a time-limited central pot to match-fund the staffing costs of completing more compulsory purchases.

Instigate and impede changes of use in line with the vision. There has been an active debate in recent years about simplifying the process for changing the material use of buildings on high streets. Advocates argue that greater flexibility would make it easier to adapt and retrofit existing buildings for new uses. Opponents counter that more permissive development rights make management much harder, especially when buildings are converted to homes or even Houses in Multiple Occupation.

Both have a point, but the real issue is the power problem. At the moment, the system is confusing, poorly understood, and onerous. And when change does happen, it does make management more difficult because it happens in a strategic vacuum. Transformation Agencies need the power to instigate changes of use in line with the vision and to block changes that would run counter to it.

Money

The second element of the programme relates to funding. We do not need more public subsidy for high streets in their current state. This will only sustain the myth of a retail revival and keep us in a state of denial. We need blended public-private investment strategies at a much bigger scale than any government could offer.

This would require four connected changes in how we resource high streets:

· Pooled Public Sector Budgets.

· A Single Capital Pot.

· Local Rolling Infrastructure Funds.

· Facilitating access to ‘quality’ private capital.

Before I explain each of those, let me briefly adumbrate the problem.

Local partners do not have access to the range of financial tools and levers they need to make a lasting difference. They are reliant on discretionary grants and funding streams from central government.

These pots of money are too short-term, too small-scale, and too limited in scope. In effect, they fund sensible but partial and ameliorative improvements; scrubbing away the worst indications of decline, without putting high streets on the front foot for the future.

On a few occasions, I have been in client meetings during which partners have come to the correct but damning conclusion that they would have to be less radical in order to increase their odds of winning funding from Whitehall.

This would not be such a problem if local authorities and their partners had alternative funding sources. But, outside a few marquee, city-centre locations, that is not the case. Most councils can’t raise discretionary regeneration funds while they are struggling to cover the costs of their statutory duties.

Access to private finance is also highly restricted. Few private investors, whether looking for a short-term profit or a longer-term yield, are attracted to high streets as a viable proposition. Although that, as I argue below, can be changed.

Councils can borrow, but few have the capacity and confidence to do so successfully. Haunted by examples like Thurrock and Croydon, which racked up £1.6bn in debt, including £320m in negative equity due to poor property investments, Directors of Finance across the land will be urging their leaders to avoid the debt option.

We need to make available a wider range of financial tools and levers so that local partners can break the reliance of short-term grants and take meaningful and lasting action. We need to start by making far better use of existing public sector budgets.

Pooled Public Sector Budgets

The first step toward achieving a lasting, structural shift in how we fund the future of high streets is to radically reform how we spend existing budgets.

The model for this change is a little-known but important pilot programme called ‘Total Place’ from the late 2000s. The dual aims of Total Place were to: first, calculate how much money was spent by all parts of the public sector in a place; then use that data to spend the money in a far more effective and collaborative fashion.

The project didn’t get beyond the first stage of doing the sums. With more than a hint of irony, it was cut as part of the austerity programme as councils resorted to the annual programme of ‘salami-slicing’ budget instead of thinking about strategic, multi-year savings.

Nonetheless, the insights from the first stage demonstrate the potential for delivering more with less. The largest council to participate in the pilot was Birmingham. In late 2000s money, the public sector spent £7,500m or three quarters of a billion pounds every year. Consider how that money was spent, and the potential for achieving far more with it.

In relation to unemployment, partners spent 93% on out-of-work benefits, and only 7% on helping people to get into work. In the domain of health and wellbeing, an even greater proportion of 96% was spent on treating the symptoms of illness, and a miniscule 4% on prevention.

A similar pattern was repeated again and again across the range of public sector expenditure; spending was reactive and uncoordinated. This was partly a reflection of the top-down nature of funding in the UK, with the demands of different funding departments making collaboration more difficult.

We can’t, however, always point the finger at Whitehall. Even within the constraints of our overly-centralised system, there is scope for far more proactive collaboration.

For our purposes, this would mean all the relevant agencies pooling the money they spend on the high street. From the police’s expenditure on patrols, through the council’s spend on everything from health and safety inspections to physical regeneration, to the activities of agencies like libraries that are often found in or around high streets.

It would then be the role of the Transformation Agency to identify savings and efficiencies that actually deliver better outcomes; shifting from the current pattern of reactive, fractured spend to a new model of planned, coordinated investment.

The creation and successful delivery of a pooled local budget could be matched at the national level by the creation of a single capital pot.

Single Capital Pot

A pooled local budget would deliver major efficiency gains in the use of revenue budgets. It wouldn’t solve the problem that councils don’t have access to sufficient amounts of capital.

Central government is one source of capital but, as Michael Heseltine put it in ‘No Stone Unturned’, departments make money available in “penny packets” or “parcels of cash attached to specific projects, each with their own particular objectives, timetable and requirements.”

Inevitably, this means local partners never have the amount of capital they need to make a lasting difference. They are painting over the signs of decline, literally and metaphorically, until the next little “penny packet” comes along.

The simplest solution is for the relevant central government departments to pool their capital allocations into a single pot and make that available, without ring-fences or other strings attached, to fund long-term, transformational high street interventions.

Sceptics may point out that Heseltine made the very same case in ‘No Stone Unturned’. He called for the creation a single, cross-departmental pot to cover all forms of regeneration that would be worth £50bn per year. HM Treasury, under the stewardship of George Osborne, made sympathetic noises toward the Tory grandee, but ultimately ignored him.

Go back a little further, however, and we do find an example of a government implementing a wide-ranging rationalisation of place-based funding streams. This time, Heseltine was in government, and as Environment Secretary under John Major between 1990 and 1992, he instituted a process that led to the launch of the Single Regeneration Budget in 1994.

The next government, of whatever stripe, needs to replicate Heseltine’s achievement. Condensing and crunching the various pots of money that can be used for action on the high street into one large, single pot with minimum bureaucracy attached.

A further, more contemporary model, for a bureaucracy-lite approach is the ‘Big Local’ programme. The Big Lottery Fund initiated the programme but, instead of administering it directly, established a new, independent body called Local Trust to disburse the £200m allocated to it.

Today, 150 areas “have been given at least £1m with no strings attached to use as they see fit”. It is a ground-breaking approach, making a sharp shift from the conventional reliance on detailed monitoring and reporting.

Whitehall could adopt a similarly bold approach. Responsibility for distributing the Single Capital Pot could be delegated to an independent panel of experts. They would assess applications to the pot, in the form of deal propositions, free from departmental baggage. Their sole task would be to support the proposals that will deliver wholesale high street re-invention.

A further advantage of a single capital pot is that it can provide an initial cash injection into local Rolling Infrastructure Funds.

Rolling Infrastructure Funds

To break local partners’ induced dependence on short-term government funding pots, it is essential to create financially self-sustaining alternatives.

A Rolling Infrastructure Fund is a mechanism through which the financial returns on investments in regeneration and infrastructure are captured and re-invested. The profits from land value uplifts, additional tax revenues, and sales are recycled back into the pot to fund the next round of investment.

This allows them to be proactive place-makers, able to forward-fund new infrastructure and developments. Instead of the current situation, in which councils have to strike deals with developers who are only legally obliged to fund infrastructure when their returns are guaranteed.

The Rolling Infrastructure Fund established by partners involved in delivering the new Harlow and Gilston Garden Town, has facilitated faster and more coordinated infrastructure delivery. The alternative would have been a much slower rate of progress, as “the developer would be under contractual obligation to provide the infrastructure by the time an agreed number of housing units are completed.”

In Cambridgeshire, partners used their rolling fund to build a Guided Busway and pump-prime the Addenbrookes Access Road. These two significant transport enhancements unlocked the development of 4,000 new homes.

So far, we have looked at improving the use of public funding. In the final part of this section, let’s look at how to incentivise private sector investment in high streets.

Facilitating access to ‘quality’ private capital

Successful regeneration is not about finding innovative and imaginative ways to spend public money. Ultimately, it is about moving places off their reliance on public subsidy, by creating healthy, functional markets for services, products, and skills. That is the only way we are going to attract private finance into the spaces that we currently call high streets.

With one category of exception, investors are not going to put their money into the traditional retail model. The exception being predatory investors whose sole interest is in asset-stripping moribund brands and abandoned malls. And we don’t want their money anyway.

Instead we need to look at two sources of investment. The first is what Prof. Bruce Katz of the US Brookings Institute calls the “new class of investors” who are more conscious of environmental, social, and governance factors in how they make money.

As well as creating innovative “financial practices and instruments”, this emerging generation is “focused on growing entrepreneurs and building strong local economies”. They want to make money, but they see enlightened self-interest in investing in places that are economically successful and environmentally sustainable in the long term.

In the UK, Good Economy have developed a Place-Based Impact Investing (PBII) model that they define as: “Investments made with the intention to yield appropriate risk-adjusted financial returns as well as positive local impact, with a focus on addressing the needs of specific places”.

The second source is the category of large institutional investors, usually pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, who have a strong interest and long track record in investing in UK infrastructure. Norway’s Norge Bank Investment Fund, the Dutch APG pension fund, and French Amundi all have significant investments or Assets Under Management in the UK real estate, infrastructure, and energy projects.

Closer to home, the UK Local Government Pension Fund (LGPF) is a major institutional investor. It has assets today of around £364bn. That figure is expected to grow to £500bn by 2050. However, according to The Good Economy, only 2.4% of its investment is in UK-based ‘real economy’ assets like real estate, infrastructure, and regeneration projects.

The biggest barrier to attracting more investment from these sources is the lack of long-term investable propositions. An investor looking for a 25-year yield will not be interested in a high street regeneration programme that lasts three years and does not offer a compelling, transformative vision beyond the moribund retail model.

By contrast, there is strong investor interest in light-industrial innovation spaces, student accommodation, and supported housing for our ageing population. Even a businessman as useless as Succession’s Peter Munion could spot this latter opportunity.

Even then, the small size of an investment proposition in one individual town will dampen interest. To address this problem of scale, a group of places could work with a single provider of, for example, supported housing to create a much larger, multi-site proposition. The proposition to the investor would be the opportunity to invest in a model of development across different locations.

Whatever the mechanism, the only way to get private investment into our high streets is to send a strong signal to the market that we are serious about re-inventing them for the future.

Legacy

“My native land I will not leave a diminished heritage but greater and better than when I received it.”

These words formed part of the ephebic oath; a solemn vow sworn by the young men of ancient Athens on their eighteen birthday. It marked their entrance into the realm of adult citizenship.

We do not have such a ceremony today, but we should still feel the obligation to pass on to posterity the place we call home in a better state.

Previous generations passed that test. Thanks to their efforts, we inherited high streets that were economically vibrant, socially important, and in many places architecturally significant.

It is not our fault that, in our lifetime, high streets have become as redundant as Chester’s medieval walls. But it is our responsibility to respond to the current crisis with every last measure of energy, alacrity, and imagination.

We only have one chance to leave behind a positive legacy; there are no re-sits for this test. Like John Pemberton, we need to look at the problem from new angles and with fresh ambition.

When you next look at the dying high street at the centre of your town, imagine what might take its place: a beautiful new park offering fresh air and access to nature; affordable new homes for young families; a new night-street with an award-winning evening economy; a ground-breaking dementia-friendly town centre; a new innovation hub for high-tech businesses.

The US President Dwight D. Eisenhower once explained his approach to problem solving: “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can see the outlines of a solution.”

We have failed to deal with the death of our high streets because we have made the problem smaller. In the process, we have diminished ourselves.

We have argued over funding streams worth tens of millions when we need to be thinking about investments in the billions.

We have looked at three- to five-year plans, when we need to be looking at ten- to twenty-year strategies.

And we have thought about how to bring back the past glories of the high street, when we need to be forging the future.

Now is the time to think big. To spin silken visions. To turn our dead and dying high streets into reborn spaces that are as beautiful as butterflies.