THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT ENGLISH HIGH STREET

                                                           

Visualisation of a greener Fleet Street by WATG London’s Planning and Landscape studio

2025: Post-Corona Musings of an Urbanist

By Noha Nasser

And

Response by Professor Tom Muir

The Scenario

It’s Spring 2025. Since the pandemic, everyday life has migrated online. In its wake, the spectre of vacant buildings lay empty waiting impatiently for demolition and re-purposing. Retail, supermarkets, university campuses, schools had all hollowed out. In the latent vacuum of space, post-Corona birthed an eruption of creativity and rehabilitation. City life was re-defined. Millions of jobs disappeared, forcing people to work less. More non-work time translated into volunteering three hours a week, staying active, being creative, caring for each other, and doing more recreational activity.

This suggests a remarkably short period of time for such fundamental changes to take place in society For example, Working less means higher wages or, if not, lower incomes.

Nature and Clean Air

The air is refreshingly clean as I sit under the apple tree in The Orchard on Wembley High Road. Around me, the street is beginning to stir. I am enlivened by my day’s plans to soak up the moments for ‘social closeness’. I say ‘closeness’ to account for the months of social distancing measures that the 2020 pandemic had imposed. With most of our everyday lives now online, I value more than ever getting my daily intake of social life. Not a thing on the High Road is content to be as it was. The birdsong is an incessant resonant backdrop. Passers-by cheerfully stride to the assortment of activities that have mushroomed since the pandemic. The herb gardens divulge their scents along Wembley’s ‘4040 Linear Park’ winding its path along the Harrow Road into Central London. Things have changed. The High Road’s hard, grey planes have softened with the inhabitation of wildlife. Green living walls drape over the historic buildings. The tarmac is enveloped by lush grass, like an endless carpet. 

Of the latest technology, the solar-powered trams hum gently past me. A symbol of elegance and sophistication. Racks for bike-sharing and e-scooters position themselves strategically just off their dedicated lanes that weave in and out of the 4040 Linear Park. It is definitely quieter now that the government eradicated carbon-fuelled transport from our streets. The pandemic started a climate revolution with a wave of cities across the world appropriating their streets for nature and people. 

To some, the lack of traffic and empty roads means no work, no goods to sell, no products to market. How are goods distributed from source to consumer in a population so diffusely spread throughout the country as ours? The problem is that the land use pattern of much of our country has been developed with a dependence on vehicular transport for commercial industrial, residential and recreational functions with the accompanying pollution. It is inevitable that more than a new propulsion or driving system would in itself, be required to change this. In order to eliminate the latter, the infrastructure and population would have to be radically altered and for this to be effective it is likely that the global system would have to change also.

Education

As the street swells with movement, I notice a group of young people on their e-scooters. No doubt they are heading to one of the ‘Learning Together Hubs’ (affectionately known as The Hub). I make my way to our local Hub in what was once the large Primark, on the corner of St John’s Road. It is a place where some of the university hardware has been transferred, like science labs and workshops.

Literary enthusiasts of all ages cram into The Hub’s fair-trade organic coffee shop, an extension to the e-bookshop and Writer’s Corner. AI enabling has been wired everywhere and groups cluster with their AI headphones and smart glasses to immerse themselves in ‘experiences’ over a cup of one of the many freshly-picked herbal teas grown in the 4040 Linear Park. I still prefer face-to-face discussion groups learning about the explosion of community projects on offer, and the new Apps that are helping us be more democratically accountable and self-organise.

The Hub’s Student Forum is alive with activists. A crowd debate the increasing shift to a cashless society. There are many people who have been left behind in today’s digital society. They debate whether money is necessary at all. With the State’s new Universal Basic Services (UBS) safeguarding every individual’s material safety from housing to food to health, we need much less money to live a good life. A pressing issue is the chips the State wants to put under our skin to make payments easier, as Sweden has already trialed. There is consensus this is far too intrusive and a breach of human rights. There is no room for a heavy-handed State any longer. Our democracy is flourishing like it has never flourished before.  

This conjures up a vision of a ‘student quarter’ rather than a lifestyle pattern for young people throughout a city. I feel there is a mixture between social, economic, lifestyle and political systems which don’t seem to be reconciled effectively. Your last sentence is aspirational.

Health

Coronavirus cast a lucid light on the negative impact of under-investing in health and care. Tens of thousands of people died, and hundreds of thousands more got infected. The government quickly realised the best policy was to strengthen people’s immunity rather than spend tax payers money on a vaccine for a mutating virus. Boots, the pharmacy chain, has become the local public health ‘immunity-boosting drop-in centre’. Everything from fresh-juice making workshops, to nutritional cooking recipes, are shared in a programme of animated live demonstrations. There’s even a gym and ‘alternative medicine’ booths where I can book in with different specialists. Nurses are on hand to measure people’s vital signs and offer suggestions for a ‘whole-life’ lifestyle plan. A small fresh fruit and veg market occupies a corner.

Culture

The High Street banks have all but disappeared, converted into a variety of meeting places; lounges; community cinemas; art galleries; community project headquarters; and eateries.

What was once TKMaxx has become The Centre for Creativity; the place each citizen goes to spend their 3 hours of volunteering a week. I walk over to the Centre to offer an hour of my time. 

The Centre for Creativity is already buzzing with activity by the time I arrive. Large-scale industrial kitchens take over one end of the space. Cooking has become extremely popular since the 2020 lockdown. I can smell the familiar waft of fresh bread from the ovens, and my stomach reminds me it is wise to have some lunch. I stroll over to the local café run by volunteers, serving a variety of multicultural fusion cooking created by the kitchens. I savour the taste of Sushi Burrito. Brent remains a very culturally-diverse borough, and the pandemic catalysed an invigorated recognition of the richness of our cultural diversity and the need to come together. 

This is a highly middle-class perspective, possibly accurate for some areas but unsure of its relevance as a model even for some areas in Brent; Rich and diverse are words often used to describe tense, threatening areas with conflict, particularly with authority!

As I sit in The Parlour I watch people scurrying to catch their classes. Everything from recording studios, artist studios, yoga studios, singing workshops and keep fit classes are taking place in every square inch of space. Most of the activities are taking place open plan or behind glass classrooms where I can glimpse the rich intensity of our new-found creativity. I prepare myself to lead a group of people on an urban safari of the High Road for an hour of my volunteer time. I am looking forward to showing them the new integrated food-planting landscape strategy in King Edward VII Park.

Public Space

Food-growing in every possible nook or cranny is now the norm; pavements, verges, front gardens, blank walls, and hanging baskets on lamp posts. During the pandemic panic-buying frenzy, supermarket shelves were emptied overnight.  It was a sobering lesson to avoid over-reliance on getting food from suppliers. A new movement to ‘grow-your-own’ food in season has become a trailblazer. Inspired by Incredible Edible in Yorkshire, set up in 2012, guerrilla urbanism has taken over left-over spaces in the neighbourhood to meet the exponential need for fresh food. This new landscape strategy all over the capital has transformed our streets from planting fruit trees, to herb-gardens, to vegetable patches. It’s free for people to plant and eat. Allotments are flourishing in local neighbourhoods to produce enough for the locals. More and more land that comes forward as parts of the city are no longer needed is being turned into food farms. The abandoned schools, in particular, have converted their playgrounds and classrooms into greenhouses and food planting. Nature has appropriated the city.

As I cross the 4040 Linear Park to The Centre, a solar-powered delivery robot cuts my path, and parks up in front of Wembley Central Station. It is most likely waiting for instructions about where to drop off its goods. 

Retail

The big retail parks that once stood as cancerous sentinels on the outskirts of the suburbs, had sucked the town centre dry, destroying the High Street in its metastasis. After the pandemic, the huge shift to home-delivery significantly reduced car-based traffic. The empty swathes of grey tarmac carparks, a new home for retail storage units.   

Delivery robots come in all sizes using a tracking system. The largest delivery vehicles use the existing railway tracks of London’s underground system to alleviate congestion on the road network, transferring their goods into smaller more compact vehicles. My favourite are the small delivery robots called Starships, inspired by the first generation of delivery robots in Milton Keynes started in 2018. They mostly deliver food shopping and other essentials.

Many people, especially retired ones, see the trip to the supermarket as substantially recreational and home delivery is a lonely activity, For this role, they would have to become a much more frequent activity, yet not providing any employment thereby possibly being functionally more efficient but less socially and economical. By the way how do the goods get from the tube stations to all the shops assuming they arrive by rail?

Housing

I will also be taking my urban safarists to the new hotels for rough sleepers near Wembley Stadium. During the March 2020 lockdown, hotels suffered huge loss of business. The Mayor of London at the time, Sadiq Khan, booked 1000 rooms in London’s hotels to ensure the homeless could self-isolate. This policy made him very popular, winning him a second term in office. With the shift to ‘home-working’, many office blocks became ghost towns. Within two years of his second term, the Mayor has converted office space into fully financed residential units for homeless shelters, care homes, and housing for those unable to afford the inflated London rents. The UK’s housing crisis was saved almost overnight. 

A loud voice calling my name from the microphone brings me to attention. It’s time to meet my guests. I head to the Forum. I can’t wait to share my urban safari with them. To show them how the English High Street has transformed into a Greek agora; a place for politics; commerce; education; spirituality; public space; nature and civic life to thrive. The local has claimed back the global, thanks to the Coronavirus pandemic. The High Street lives on.

Professor Tom Muir’s Ending:

Suddenly I felt a jerk and heard a bang - I had slipped off my seat on the bus and was rudely awakened from my slumber by my bag falling down. I quickly adjusted my seating and began looking out of the window as the city passed by. My mind was still occupied by a vivid dream I had been having just before I wakened but I soon began to notice the life of the city beginning to invade the streets after the working day. I became fascinated by the infinite variety of people, their apparently chaotic movements yet every one moving in a unique purposeful pattern clearly with different objectives. 

The buildings which formed their routes were ugly, beautiful, dignified or nondescript in fact just like the people scurrying around them. I was struck by the seemingly disorganised scene, but realised whenever I was in the streets as one of them, I was absolutely sure where I was going, when I was due there and why I was going; as was everyone I was watching; the scene was not chaotic but a highly managed system in which every component was their own manager sharing the same ‘territory’ but using it for their own unique purpose. A quotation I often give my students came into my mind ‘everyone lives in their own city’ and in order to survive each one makes the appropriate concession necessary for the whole to survive.

I started thinking of the subject of my dream and how different this ‘ideal’ city had been with its clearly structured environment provided in such a way so as to facilitate a series of spaces which enabled events and activities embodying a range of views inculcating their values through spatial organisation and provision. I still felt that those values did represent a more harmonious relationship between the people, their urban environment and the rural context, but I found it increasingly hard to see the dynamism, energy and diversity that the scene I was looking at now in the image of my dream. It would certainly incorporate coherence, shared values, and many other qualities which would be desirable, but were they the qualities of a city in our contemporary society?

I thought of Rob Venturi's taxology in ‘Complexity and Contradiction’– hybrid rather than pure: compromising rather than clean: distorted rather than straightforward: ambiguous rather than articulated: perverse as well as impersonal: boring as well as interesting: conventional as well as designed: accommodating rather than excluding: redundant rather than simple: inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am now for messy vitality over obvious unity.

I squirmed around in my seat making myself more comfortable (and secure!) closed my eyes and felt glad to be going home to my complex and surprising family, my ordinary house. My messy life full of compromise and ambiguity, inconsistent and ambiguous but it was all so familiar, comfortable and homely. I dropped off to sleep.

Possible Lines of Enquiry

• What values would a post-corona High Street imbue?
• What are the place qualities that would balance between a planned/ordered and chaotic/emergent place? Is one type of place better than the other?
• Would the post-corona high Street encourage bottom-up urbanism?

This blog entry was inspired by the following sources:

WATG are fully credited for the image at the top of this article. London has been buzzing the last two years following an idea from Guerrilla Geographer and Creative Explorer, Daniel Raven-Ellison, to make London the world’s first National Park City.  And during the summer of 2017, London Mayor Sadiq Khan threw his full support behind the campaign to set a long-term target to make more than 50% of the Capital green.The WATG Landscape Architecture team were inspired to contribute to this socially important initiative in the Capital. The visualisation was created to support the announcement of ‘Green Block’ – a prototype concept created by WATG in response to the National Park City challenge. https://www.watg.com/watg-unveils-innovative-green-block-to-help-make-london-the-worlds-first-national-park-city/

The supermarket chain, the Co-op in Milton Keynes has trialled the use of robots called spaceships to deliver shopping: https://www.miltonkeynes.co.uk/news/people/starships-obliging-robots-extend-their-delivery-area-bring-lunch-or-dinner-more-people-milton-keynes-2448849

Three weeks into the lockdown, Sue Manns, President of the RTPI wrote some personal reflections on what a post-Covid19 exit strategy might look like. She focused on the impact on legislation; the high street; transport; and digital connectivity: https://www.rtpi.org.uk/about-the-rtpi/rtpi-presidents/sues-updates/week-3-of-the-covid-19-lockdown/

Nesta, a UK Think Tank describes the ways in which the pandemic can change key areas of life; political, economic, socio-cultural; technological; legal; and environmental: https://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/there-will-be-no-back-normal/

This article examines the way the state and society will handle the economic impact of Covid-19 in directing resources questioning global supply chains, wages and productivity. The author explores four possible scenarios; state capitalism; barbarism; state socialism; and mutual aid. https://theconversation-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/theconversation.com/amp/what-will-the-world-be-like-after-coronavirus-four-possible-futures-134085

This article similarly questions the foundations of capitalism and the fragility of the economy that has for too long extracted value from the economy: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/coronavirus-covid19-business-economics-society-economics-change

This article is the debate on a cashless society as being something that governments are encouraging but which could impact groups within society negatively by socially excluding them: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/12/19/millions-would-be-put-at-risk-in-a-cashless-society-research-warns.html

This academic paper considers the correlation between place value and place quality, arguing that a place’s value delivers social, environmental, health and economic benefits and is closely related to the quality of their ‘use’ value. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13574809.2018.1472523

Incredible Edible is an inspiring food growing movement where they plant food on under-used public land: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K1NoNsi2mY

As the lockdown was starting the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, offered rough sleepers a hotel room in the vacant hotels in the capital so they could self-isolate properly and humanely:  https://www.london.gov.uk/press-releases/mayoral/rough-sleepers-to-be-offered-hotel-beds-to-isolate

Bike sharing schemes and e-scooter schemes have become a popular way to travel sustainably around a city, known more commonly as micro-mobility: https://revolve.media/micro-mobility-challenges-and-opportunities-for-cities-regions/

Ubuntu Contributionism is a movement planning for a new social structure that would liberate humanity from the tyranny of money and work, and increase our abundance and productivity. They key to unlocking this new social structure is called One Small Town: https://www.ubuntucontributionism.org/one-small-town

This article describes the way that technology has helped communities and organisations self-organise during the pandemic: https://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/smart-cities-during-covid-19/

This article identifies international business travel; home working; and sector disruption as three ways that may radically change post-Corona: https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-three-ways-the-crisis-may-permanently-change-our-lives-133954

Biographies:

Noha is an architect/urban designer, academic and social entrepreneur with a passion for connecting people across different cultures through the design of cities and international travel. She runs two social enterprises; MELA and Life in a Travel Bag. She has published a book called ‘Bridging Cultures: a guide to social innovation in the cosmopolitan city’ (2015) and edited/authored two books; ‘Connections: 12 approaches to relationship-based placemaking’ (2017) and ‘Human Crossings: 9 Stories about refugees’ (2019) – the latter her first foray into creative writing. You can email Noha on nassernoha@hotmail.com.

Tom is Professor (Emeritus), Architect, Urban Planner, Urbanist, Rationalist and Utopian skeptic. You can contact Tom on tdm36636@gmail.com.

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