The decline and fall of the English high street

'Woman is born free but is everywhere in chain stores.'

This is the line to a Spectator cartoon of thirty years ago - would it be considered sexist now?

The British High Street is dying. All the time the papers cover stories about famous retail chains going bust. It saddens me that people are now going to shopping centres instead, but they are terribly convenient. 

It does not sadden me that the chains are dying. Let them die. They made every high street in England the same street. Now they make every shopping centre the same too, I suppose. 


The same thing is happening around Western and Eastern Europe. It happened in North America long ago. How drearily undiverse the world has become. Not just shopping but life in general. Go to Rome and Lisbon for small family shops and businesses, while they last there.

Let's see if high streets can still serve a purpose, beyond places for retired and unemployed people to saunter. I revisited my home town, Southend-on-Sea, last summer and found that most of the very few people in the formerly thronged High St were over seventy.

If people still want to go in large numbers to the centre of towns they will. It depends partly on whether they want to meet other people, mostly people who work in shops. If not, they can become residential streets, variegated with restaurants and pubs.

But pubs are dying too, because of the smoking ban, high taxes and the feminisation of society. Pubs used to be very male places. It is in the interests of the state that people do not go to pubs, where they may pick up diverse and possibly dangerous political ideas. Much better that they stay home and watch propaganda on television.

P.S. I hate shopping except for (preferably second-hand) books and in Jermyn St. Second-hand bookshops are not censored yet, but Jermyn St has become democratic. It was once about hierarchy and the class system.