Letter to the Editor
Dear Editor
What is to become of the High Street?
In essence the future of property in the High Street is in owner occupier small shops and ground floor offices with accommodation. E.g. Take a shop front, 22 foot wide, divide it into two, giving each access, and 8 foot of window display space.
One of the shops would have a work space and their living accommodation behind the family business, which is all accommodated within the ground floor. While the other frontage, would have the High Street facing glass display and stairs up to a work area and living accommodation above.
In essence, the days of the lock up shop are over!
What people require is a place to work and display their chattels, this then creates a live-in business opportunity at little cost to the family for the accommodation, as the business underwrites the living space.
Such business will be bespoke and dedicated to singular products.
- Bread of discerning quality and content.
- A Jam and marmalade preserve shop
- A shop selling every type of Tea and Coffee
- Art, hand made Jewellery, hand made leather goods, bespoke furniture etc.
- Also accommodating the many new business that are growing out of the need to supply consumer computer services, these professionals are currently working out of the third bedroom they need to create a commercial High Street identity at the same cost as working from home.
- Service businesses
- A cluster of book shops all energised around different readers wants, children's, travel, fiction, historical: Such business would be stocked as out-reach displays suppliers by the possibly the likes of Amazon. Being that the internet warehouses become the High Street wholesaler, as postal distribution costs are set to rise dramatically in 20010/11, making internet sales uncompetitive on a single item purchases. Thus rebirth of the small bespoke specialist retailer supplied by the big internet retail houses to supplement stock rotation!
It is these bespoke family (Face and Name) retail service providers, congregated around a High Street which our community used to love and admire as ‘local heroes’ they still provide such products such the ‘Petches’ or Ellison’s Pork Pie’
Take the Sunters sisters who had a bread shop in Redcar High Street for 70 years. They awoke each morning from their beds above the shop at 4am. They baked, opening their shop at 7:30am and were closed by lunch time, sold out scrubbed up and sitting in front of a roaring fire in a black range within their living room out the back of the shop.
Why could they compete with the wholesale bakers of the time? The Sunters sister lived for nothing or very little. They only had the rent of the shop to pay for, from which they earn their living!
Business people can’t afford to rent a work place and also pay a mortgage on their home.
The High Street businesses of the future require owner occupier or rented property with a consumer accessible display window from which they work and live above and behind.
Had the Government spent 12 billion on grants to make this happen within our nations empty High Streets, rather than the VAT give away. The country would have a new focus and a more creative hands on level manufacturing base to lean upon, where
just enough is the profit model of the future.
Yours sincerely
Philip Chisholm
01642 485322
12 Stirling Road Redcar.