The Great British High Street — is it really worth saving?
A Southwark Park Road safari
Stretching across Bermondsey from a turning off Tower Bridge Road by the St Savior’s Estate to the A2208, as it heads on to Surrey Quays station, the A2206 — more commonly known as Southwark Park Road — serves as a great case study for what London’s typical ‘high street’ looks like. The types of shops lining this road are not simply dictated by chance, but rather by choice. Consumer retail outlets exist both as a response to demographic factors and through incentives that have emerged from government policy. Let’s take a walk through the centre of the road and see what we can surmise.
Value supermarkets
The first stops on our journey are at Iceland and Savers. Iceland’s presence is not surprising: anyone who has been across the country would expect a value supermarket here. They are institutions intrinsically tied to the demographics of the surrounding area — approximately 30% of residents across Southwark’s council boundaries live in social housing. Likewise, a bystander would not be surprised to find a Savers next door. For the uninitiated user of value supermarkets, like myself, what struck me when I walked down were the opening hours.
While Sunday trading laws are generally beneficial to value players, which often look to occupy premises with lower square footage, the Iceland on Southwark Park Road opens for only thirteen hours per day even on weekdays. On Sunday, those hours compact into a slot between 10am and 4pm. From a rough estimate, the premise occupies around 7000 sq. ft, significantly above the 3000 that allows a premise to choose its opening hours on a Sunday. Savers, which will operate on an even less opex-friendly model, only opens for nine hours per day during weekdays.
The easiest conclusion one can make when walking through is that both these premises and their opening hours are not the result of chance, but in response to demand. The Tesco Express further down the road, with standard 7am-11pm hours daily, is likely to hoover up the ‘yuppie’ contingent that live in proximity to the road. Value chains, on the other hand, deal with daytime shoppers and I’d be very surprised if the Poundland, the Savers, or the Iceland in this space had any significant footfall past 5pm on weekdays.
The clustering is also of note — my immediate comparison was with Wandsworth Road, which is a similar distance out from central London in the South West of the city and has a similarly located Tesco Express besides a crossroads (though not on the crossroads itself — which features a Ladbrokes). However, there you will find a Caffè Nero and a Sainsbury’s adjourning the other corners, with a Sendero’s speciality coffee shop taking up the remaining slot.
Bookmakers
Of interest to me were the Admiral, Betfred William Hill, and Ladbrokes in close constituency to one another on the same road. The immediate conclusion I make when seeing multiple bookmakers on a high street is poverty and some level of crime. While in a time of reduced need for brick-and-mortar footprint on Britain’s high streets it’s not uncommon to see a bookmaker, it is always interesting when you spot a cluster. The margins that pureplay gamblers are able to operate on are much higher than in betting shops and the significant crime risk that a bookmaker has through a business that requires some cash presence are incentives enough not to have any footprint.
The demographic groups who frequent these shops in person are likely to be split into two groups. The first are the high time preference gamblers, who I’d imagine in this area were either working-class whites who did not white flight, or the descendants of West Indian immigrants (likely second generation at most). Both groups are a common sight in bookmakers across the country. I spotted several within the Ladbrokes avidly watching the horse races on that day. This group tends to skew older, and is likely (though less so than in my childhood) to have either picked up a generous legacy pension or be on various forms of state-supplied income. Fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) are a serious problem for high time preference gamblers, with the satiating continuous play design of the machine difficult for those with little impulse control to handle.
The other group, though less prominent than before, is criminals who are likely to use it for money laundering purposes, and for this the Admiral casino exists. FOBTs were traditionally one of the best methods of laundering a high volume of cash, though the £2 limits on stake introduced in 2019 have made it more difficult for criminals to do so, paired with the new maximum of four machines per shop.
This is not a screed against the gambler or the industry. Britain’s lack of heavy handedness on gambling regulation has been a boon for the country, and as a people who frequently flock to ‘events’, horseracing has earmarked a nice spot for itself on the calendar. The contributions of Denise Coates to both the British public purse and the economy of Stoke are also commendable, and attempts to introduce regulation into gambling should be vigorously opposed.
Charity shops
Next to the ‘permanently closed’ Presco Food and Wine was a Mind. Again, a charity shop in a deprived area did not come as a huge surprise to me. It is no secret that charity shops benefit from business rates relief, and have a significant reduction in operating expenditure which allows a brick-and-mortar presence that would otherwise be unviable. The charity shop fundraising model would likely be unviable in an e-commerce environment, and it is highly unlikely that if charity shops switched to a pureplay model that punters would be as willing to go out of their way to purchase from Mind — the online store, for instance, only has nine ‘pre-loved luxury’ products. As was to be expected, the product mix was varied; the one John Lewis ANYDAY t-shirt I spotted was in between items from George and Next.
What was of greater interest to me was a REMAR store selling furniture across the road. I had never heard of REMAR, a charity that purports to (last website update in 2019) have assisted ‘hundreds of socially excluded people’ in breaking away from lives of addiction. Such a low hit rate over three decades and less than £1m per year raised in charity fundraising can’t purport to much success. In any case, what interested me about REMAR was both their wider footprint – the other store operated in Leytonstone, in a similar setting on Leytonstone High Road – and their furniture only product range. This was another immediate marker for poverty in the area. Products there are likely to have suffered significant wear and tear, with any new homeware likely to be outlet goods sold at a discount. I’d expected there to be a greater number of charity shops on this section of Southwark Park Road, so I was surprised there were only those two and the Sue Ryder Cancer Care, which had a similar product mix to Mind but was slightly less appealing.
Hair and beauty
One of the greatest demographic developments of modern London is the rise in ‘hair and beauty’ shops peppered across the A roads in the city. It would be wrong to talk about any hair and beauty shop without referring to the dispute in Peckham that took place in summer 2023, in which the owners of Peckham Hair & Cosmetics were met with heavy protests after an altercation with a ‘customer’. It served as an interesting case study for a unique dynamic that did not ever exist in Britain before the twenty-first century — a subcontinental shop owner serving products that catered almost exclusively to black women. Having walked past the famed PAKS Hair World in North London on numerous occasions, I was aware of this dynamic at a glance, and a quick search on Companies House revealed to me the same situation was at play here.
I didn’t walk into the hair and beauty shop, though I did spend a considerable amount of time on Google Maps reading the reviews. What interested me was the low rating (2.6 star average) and the comments. Reviewers had complained about accusations of theft from the owner — which was a dynamic we have seen at play in Peckham and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were to happen again in London — but also of pricing discrepancies. One review that interested me was a reviewer saying that the wife of the owner had charged £44 plus shipping for four toners, while the online price came to £32. Other issues that had been levelled against the place were of inconsistent opening times. While the demographic profile for such a shop makes sense, particularly as Southwark Council offers the same business rates relief for small businesses that is in operation across the country, the long-term operation of this store is in a greater level of doubt than other enterprises mentioned. Readers should look for a powder-keg incident to take place in this store between it and its customers.
The constituents
The street can’t be understood without the context of its residents. In this case, the biggest bellwether for the street was social housing. Social housing rates were fairly high on average across all groups (31.3%), with Asians the lowest at 20.5%, whites at 24%, and Black Caribbean & African at 52%. What interested me was that Southwark council is one of the larger social landlords in the country, with roughly 55,000 homes across the borough. This number is about 40% of the entire housing stock in the area, split between local authority and housing association provision.
The council has, as expected, historically raised social rents by as little as possible, with council rents as of 2023 remaining in the lower quartile of the twenty-nine London Boroughs that had social housing stocks. Despite its central location, the average rent in 2023/4 for a council-owned property stood at £115.90 per week, some 15% below the government’s own CPI+1% target for social housing of £135.43. An onslaught of private development on the Southwark Park Road is unlikely, as private developers in Southwark face challenges in navigating the borough’s ambitious housing goals. The council’s target of 35% affordable housing for all new developments can significantly impact profit margins, as developers must dedicate a substantial portion of their projects to lower-priced (and thus lower-margin) housing.
While the council has stated that it aims to streamline the planning process, its commitment to ensuring ‘diverse housing options’ across the borough suggests that developers may still encounter delays to ensure their projects meet the council’s expectations for affordability and community benefits. In its 2020 New Southwark Plan, the council explicitly stated a commitment to ‘maximising the supply of genuinely affordable housing association social rent and intermediate homes through Section 106 decisions’. A Section 106 obligation, under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, is a legal mechanism which focuses on the ‘impact of development’. In essence, it is a tribute paid by the private developer to the council and its citizens. Section 106s have been utilised in Southwark (and across the country) repeatedly in order to create ‘affordable houses’ in otherwise private developments that would go at market rate. It’s difficult to build on mass or at scale with these disincentives in an otherwise prime piece of real estate.
Unfortunately, the sorry profile of Southwark Park Road is something that is by design, and is entirely avoidable. The situation is assisted by the sclerotic requirements of planning regulation which is upheld by local government and the underclass it facilitates through policy decisions. What should be prime real estate is instead home to a number of post-war buildings that house gambling shops, value supermarkets, and charity shops. While the rise of e-commerce has made the shopping experience exponentially more efficient and enjoyable through allowing one-click purchasing for consumers and removing the operating expenditure of brick-and-mortar stores for vendors, its high street replacements often reflect a regression in the walking experience.