The Demise of...........

We found ourselves in Wolverhampton in the afternoon by a circuitous route of the gym and a car sales showroom.  I thought it would be heaving but it was very quiet.  It added to the sense of it being run down, with large numbers of shop fronts either boarded up or with white wash across the windows.

For a city I've known for more than 30 years it felt abandoned.  I used to work in offices in the town (before it got city status), and popping into the shops at lunchtimes was a regular pleasure, always something to see, perhaps even buy, there was a vibrance to the centre.  Top of those was popping into the local department store, Beatties, now House of Fraser.  Its deterioration  is clear to see and it now looks more like Sports Direct as half the stock in the store seems to have come from that business with large swathes of sports goods across the floors.  Whole floors have been closed off, even those that are open have large areas devoid of merchandise.  I imagine the Beattie family would be turning in their graves to see the state of the store.  This scene is in one of the stair wells with peeling paintwork left for all to see.  Everything feels so tired.  

I appreciate we are going through a transitional stage in the high street, with ever more merchandise being bought on-line (and I recognise my shopping habits have moved towards that way of buying in recent years).  Hopefully, we can work out how to breath new life into these areas but it seems to me that only a few select town/city shopping centres will survive in the medium to long term.  In our area it may only be Birmingham.  The start of this trend back in the 1980s, away from the traditional town centre wasn't on-line, but the out of town shopping centres like Merry Hill, but even some of those are unlikely to survive as our shopping habits change.

It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few years but I struggle to see how it can be (or should be?) helped to recover.