I cringed as I read this, thinking about the way the geniuses at the BRA have their heads in the 1950s-80s and can't seem to imagine any new development without massive big box stores, or with small-footprint stores (cases in point being the entire Seaport, the Downtown Crossing developments, developments in the Fenway, and the likes of the Assembly Square "outlet mall" project in Somerville):
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/32edd384-1044-11e1-8211-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1fIQuTbnI
November 25, 2011
Window pains
By Edwin Heathcote
I long to see Britain’s high streets transformed from drab architectural clones into spaces that allow us to dream
Christmas is as much about the preparation as about the day. The thrill, at least for anyone who enjoys it, is in the anticipation. It used to begin for me with a kind of central London ritual. I’d try to make time at the end of a day in mid-December to make a retail pilgrimage following a trail of shopping shrines that took me from Soho to St James’s to buy all the little luxuries that make the precious few days off that little bit richer and more indulgent.
I’d start in Frith Street with a stop in Angelucci’s. This tiny, family-run coffee supplier once provisioned virtually every coffee shop in London’s Little Italy. The smell was all-encompassing, a cloud of warm, fresh-roasted coffee that enveloped you on a cold December day. After having my beans ground, I would pop next door to the garish, strip-lit formica shell of the Bar Italia, for a stand-up shot of treacly, bittersweet espresso.
Then I’d walk down Old Compton Street to Camisa, another old remnant of Little Italy, a crowded store, every inch of its airspace populated by hanging hams or panettone, by a plethora of pastas and porcini. You spent quite a while in there because there would always be a long queue of Italians stocking up for the festive period. It smelt of essence of Italy. I’d pick up a panettone or a pandoro, which you could only then get in Italian delis, as well as some prosciutto and fresh ravioli.
Then on to Piccadilly where I’d stop at Fortnum & Mason for a few chocolates. I’d walk along to Hatchards for some books and finally I’d stroll down to Jermyn Street and St James’s to window-shop and finish up at Berry Bros & Rudd for a couple of bottles of bordeaux. It would take a while and it was wildly inefficient – I might have to queue six times for just a few small items and I would finish with bulging bags but, at the end of it, it really felt like Christmas. And the contents of my bags smelt wonderful. Since then, though, something has happened. Angelucci’s has gone, Bar Italia has turned into a tourist nightmare but most of the rest is still there, just as it was. What has changed is that I can pop along to my local Waitrose and get everything I ever could in Soho in one place. The panettone, the prosciutto and parmesan, the chocolates and cakes, even passable fresh ravioli.
So now I have no excuse to spend hours strolling through Soho. But where’s the pleasure? Where’s the anticipation? The supermarket is a space of the everyday, not the special. It also means I need to walk down my local high street.
I live in Putney, a prosperous part of London in which I grew up – when it wasn’t quite so prosperous. Yet despite the wealth, its high street is a dismal parade of the same shops you might find in any second-tier town. Greggs the baker, Topshop, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Marks and Spencer, WH Smith, Boots, Superdrug, Poundland, Currys, McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Starbucks – you get the idea. In the high street and surrounding roads, I also counted 16 hairdressers, two extra Sainsbury’s, seven charity shops and 28 estate agents. Shops are the architectural interface of the city with the street. This is a landscape of aesthetic and social dysfunction.
A couple of years ago, I returned from a few days in France just before Christmas, from the wet, northern-grey streets of Lille. It’s a big city with the same problems as other post-industrial places yet its centre was stuffed with the most gorgeous displays. The bakers and butchers, jewellery stores and design shops, patisseries, cafés and toy shops, each had a more seductive and sparkling window display than its neighbour. The streets were alive deep into the night with families strolling and window-shopping. Walking back from the station in prosperous Putney, not a single shop had an eye-catching Christmas display, only garishly printed banners displaying the latest offers and promotions. If the future of the West is pure consumerism, how can it possibly be so little fun? If shopping is, as architect Rem Koolhaas suggests, the last civic and public activity left, why is the British high street dismal instead of celebratory?
There has been plenty written about the decline of the high street, about cloned stores and homogeneity and about the 2,000 independent shops disappearing from our high streets each year. We are all complicit in this decline. The French buy baguettes at the boulangerie and cold cuts at the charcuterie, and they survive – albeit with municipal assistance.
This decline is a profound social, architectural and aesthetic problem. It is caused by the big supermarkets being too good at what they do, satisfying demand and making profit. High streets, without the special and the particular, die; they cease to be urbane. The increasing prevalence of “Metro”, “Express” or “Local” roll-outs of the big brand supermarkets is devastating to the appearance of the streets that define the everyday life of the city and the suburb. This is a culture of retail in which the membrane between retail and street is slimmed down to an expressionless plate glass window, a dumbing down that leads to the aesthetic and spatial poverty of the street. The powder-coated, aluminium-framed plate-glass window is the easiest, most efficient and most economical solution but it is also deadening. If goods demand that they be behind glass, then displays can at least be imaginative, bold and striking. Design, art and architecture students could be brought in to fashion displays, perhaps for Christmas or changing seasons – department store Harvey Nichols’ display has become famous for exactly this radical use of its Knightsbridge shopfront.
The shopfront is a complex ecosystem. It has depth and delight, a cocktail of materials from transparent glass to polished brass. A good shop window can define a street and nurture a relationship. There is currently a furore about London’s Burlington Arcade. Its owners want to get rid of the small retailers who form its character, creating bigger stores instead to bring in the high-rental global luxury brands that dominate neighbouring Bond Street.
The arcade was once a microcosm of urban bustle, its dozens of craftsmen and jewellers downstairs and courtesans in the rooms above together servicing the needs of a wealthy West End elite. Its windows are a wonder, a sparkling, fairy-tale marketplace of expensive, eccentric, uselessly luxurious things, as much for looking at as for buying. The windows are like proscenium arches to theatrical worlds of temptation. Walter Benjamin called such arcades the “Dream Houses of the collective”, the spaces in which the products of modern consumer culture are allowed to shine and provoke a profound desire. Benjamin’s elegiac romanticism is difficult to square with the window of my Tesco Metro. Streets need to allow us to dream again, to become places to provoke desire and, in a way, just to provoke, to make us look again and see the city anew as a place that is alive rather than an architectural Stepford wife.
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Highs and lows
London’s best high streets
Jermyn Street This top-end blend of cheese and pyjamas, shirts, gentlemen’s grooming products and art supplemented by Fortnum & Mason is wonderful. It also has a church by 17th-century architect Christopher Wren, Piccadilly Arcade and some of the most beautiful surviving shop fronts in the City.
Lamb’s Conduit Street It was the last high street in London to lack a single chain store – till it got a Starbucks. The community co-operative People’s Supermarket and its quirky blend of stores, cool restaurants and traditional shops make it a rarity. Its elegant, restrained Georgian house fronts also make for a coherent, urbane aesthetic.
Electric Avenue A panorama of colour, scent, and exotic food in an elegantly curving Victorian conduit. A mix of shops and stalls from Africa and the Caribbean to China, halal butchers and record stores. Never elegant, always lively.
London’s worst high streets
Oxford Street Not a conventional high street but, supposedly and inexplicably, Britain’s most popular shopping street. Why? You can get nearly anything you can find here from any mall anywhere. Its chain storefronts are deeply depressing and it is saved only by the monumental bombast of Selfridges.
Putney High Street Good scale and diverse architecture completely ruined by heavy traffic, identikit shops and cloned stores.
Streatham High Rd Once voted Britain’s worst high street, this one’s a tatty mess. Its problems are exacerbated by ugly street furniture, empty shops and awful traffic problems. But it is, at least, unique.
