‘New town’ offers a vision of how to bring life back to the main streets of the struggling UK

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It was built as a post-war utopia for families seeking escape from bomb-damaged parts of London, but nearly 80 years after its founding, the ‘new town’ of Stevenage is in dire need of regeneration.

After two failed attempts over the past decade that relied on attracting large retailers, the city is attempting an approach that reflects a new way of thinking about how to breathe life into Britain’s provincial high streets.

“We’ve had two previous attempts at regeneration in the last 20 years, but they were retail-based,” said Richard Henry, the area’s Labor council leader, recalling how a number of brands have left the city centre, leaving some holes behind.

“The new approach is based on building new apartments in the city center and creating new job opportunities,” he added. “We need to be more than a commuter town where workers come and go from London, we want to create a place where investors aspire to come.”

This more holistic approach is encapsulated in More than Stores, an industry report from planning consultancy Marrons which highlights why successful high street regeneration cannot rely on the increasingly vulnerable retail sector.

Instead, inner cities looking to reinvent themselves must blend their commercial spaces with mixed residential housing, flexible office space, leisure and entertainment options, as well as healthcare and heritage that transform main streets into lived spaces.

The pressure to be more creative comes from a growing shift to online shopping and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw more than 17,000 UK shops close in 2022, second the think tank of the Center for Retail Research.

Restoration of major roads has been a key part of Boris Johnsonwith a £3.6bn City Fund and a £1bn Future High Streets Fund, which has provided grants of between £5m and £15m to more than 70 successful towns.

However, piecemeal funds, which often need to be spent quickly and whose complex applications eat up valuable board time, have led to calls for a more strategic approach to spur private sector investment and better targeting of limited government resources.

Shevaun Haviland, head of the UK Chambers of Commerce, warned at the lobby group’s annual conference that abandoned shops are creating “ghost towns” that need to be brought back to life.

The BCC argued that the fragmented Whitehall Fund Funds covering the smoothing agenda should be consolidated and streamlined.

“Rebuilding cities is about ensuring that inner cities have more to offer, making them places where people access work, commerce, health, leisure,” said Jane Gratton, policy officer at the BCC.

“This means better transport links, simpler planning processes and more flexibility to attract the private sector,” he added.

A UK ‘regeneration index’, created by Marrons, illustrates the need for a broader perspective. Based on cross-data on affordable housing, population growth and job availability in 300 small UK towns, it identifies which ones had the most profound underlying resilience.

“Resilient city centers are those that are primed for private investment and have all the right ingredients for a diverse street experience. Those that are less well off tend to depend heavily on retail,” said Alex Smith, partner at law firm Shakespeare Martineau, who co-authored the report.

The authors argued that their findings offered guidance on which cities are most in need of government grants to start regeneration and cities where the ability to spend state funds was weakest.

The results showed the long-standing North-South divide in the UK, with more cities in the North and Midlands requiring government intervention, but also deep divides within regions, with some cities in the South-East and in South West England who also need assistance.

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Stevenage, which is less than 30 minutes by train from London and home to a group of technology and life sciences brands, including pharmaceutical group GSK, Airbus and IT supplier Fujitsu, has ranked among the top 20 provincial cities of the United Kingdom applying for government grants.

The city has won a £37.5m grant from the UK Government’s Towns Fund, part of which has already been spent on a new bus station and multi-storey car park with electric charging points outside the city’s station, to make easier to get to Stevenage.

But despite these early signs of progress, Stevenage Development Board Chairman Adrian Hawkins, who grew up in the area, accepts that the city still has a long way to go in reinventing itself as the advanced industrial district its founders dreamed of.

For example, the city needs to find £60m to refurbish its station, Hawkins added, gesturing to his weary entrance. “If you were from Airbus headquarters and you had an executive landing from Boeing headquarters in Seattle, that’s not exactly state-of-the-art,” she said.

Despite the need for a makeover, there are signs of structural change in the city, starting with plans for nearly 3,000 new homes in and around downtown.

Hawkins points to more than 100 flats built above the store space that previously housed a Marks and Spencers store, which left the high street in 2014. The flats helped attract a branch of PureGym, a 24-hour workout space 24, and a high street Optician connected to the NHS, with more work to come.

A new branch of Co-Space, the co-working company, now occupies a recently abandoned retail space near the city’s main square.

“It definitely feels like the pace of change has accelerated, you can see the sheer amount of buildings,” said Robert Isherwood, an independent financial adviser who runs his business from the Co-Space.

From his window, excavators are visible preparing the ground for another residential development of 536 affordable apartments, delivered by the Guinness Partnership housing association.

The council hopes there will be further momentum when Autolus Therapeutics, a gene therapy company, opens its headquarters in a space just behind the city’s main square, adding another 400 high-quality jobs.

“It’s residential that was the catalyst. We need to reinvent the city around downtown residential living,” said Piers Slater, the head of Reef Group, a developer who also has planning permission to develop an additional bunch of life science facilities on a site next door.

The ambition, said Henry, the head of the council, is that more high-end jobs will gradually see cafes and restaurants supplanting the discount stores and betting shops that currently predominate the high streets.

“We’re creating more opportunities and jobs, and we’re trying to create more of a coffee culture,” he said, warning that both government and private sector money is essential to building critical mass.

Given previous failed attempts to restart Stevenage, it will be some time for skeptics to be convinced. On the main road Louis Lobjoit prepares to open a fish and fancy grocery store, selling nuts and seeds, Turkish delight and other delicacies.

For now, she says, Stevenage’s new residents take the train to London to shop and hang out. “Where would you rather hang out, Stevenage or Soho?” she asked. But she accepted that, in time, her new store, and others like it, would attract such a clientele.