Cars as the new horses, high streets as the new high streets: Reinventing London’s high streets in the age of Amazon
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Amazon, Design, Retail, Urban Planning, London

One can endlessly debate the London high street and its destiny. And the reason we debate is that London is the high street. This city is its streets more than its buildings. The street is the basic unit of city, all over the world, but perhaps more so in London than most. That is not the same elsewhere. Formally, the likes of Stockholm, Berlin, and Copenhagen are not defined by streets but rather by courtyard blocks. Central Amsterdam is obviously canals, and then bricky green residential veins laced in-between. Italian cities are piazza, churches and courtyards, with colonnades the most distinctive contribution to a street-like forms — and urban motorways elsewhere. And whilst it’s not as if Paris and Tokyo are without meaningful streets, those cities come alive most clearly at street corners, where life spills out onto the cross-section defined by shared pedestrian space, in a way that’s highly rare in car-dominated London.

A few standalone built gems aside, London’s delight is in its variations on the street. London is the high street, right across its huge sprawl, north, south, east and west, Regent Street, Highgate, Camberwell Church Street, Kingsland Road, King’s Road.

And most of these are largely organic, unplanned delights. There are American-style malls in London, of course, but few to challenge the sheer distributed mass of high streets. Occasionally a carefully planned street significantly shapes London: Ian Nairn describes Regent Street as “the tube of space which is still Nash’s, dividing Soho from the West End smoothly, firmly and with complete understanding.” But few London planners are Nash, and few streets are Regent Street.

Most of London is messy, complex and unkempt, and gloriously so, as it is the sheer out-of-control vibrancy and diversity of the London high street that makes it work. Stepping out of the tube at Barking, say, is to be immediately be plunged into a “bath of multitude”, as Baudelaire would have it if he had ever got the District Line out east. It is a churning, unruly tangle of mobile phone shops, bus stops, vape shops, butchers of meat of various hues, newsagents crossed with 7-Elevens, flats leaning into the street above the shops, signs in all languages simultaneously.

The challenge ahead of us is that many of these elements are under threat: the shops from e-commerce; the bus stops from Uber; the newsagents and cheap flats from gentrification; and even the butchers, from an increasingly climate and health conscious community. Some of these are movements which would fall under the Mayor of London’s ‘Good Growth’ ambitions; others are clearly not. But they all play out on the high street.

Part of the reason that Britain’s high streets are the subject of constant hand-wringing is that, whilst defined around shopping, we must recall Napoleon’s jibe about Britain being “a nation of shopkeepers”. Britain is good at shops, and shopping, for better or worse (probably worse, we admit, with a guilty smile.)

Yet if shopping is what London does, and so high streets are London, we must increasingly recognise that Amazon is now shopping. So whilst some of those Barking butchers will be fine, only far fewer, and the bus stops will remain likewise, as no ‘mobility as a service’ provider can shift a population at the scale of London’s as effectively as the bus and tube, the real challenge here is e-commerce.

Amazon may now be the world’s most powerful company, effectively moving as physical infrastructure as much as digital service and product, and it has already transformed London. Not through building much yet, as previous waves of infrastructure have, but by running new applications on the same old hardware, in effect.

Without active intervention, this kind of shopping manifests itself on the one hand as thousands and thousands of vans — overly large for the context, yet largely full of air — crawling backwards and forwards over the city at huge cost to climate, health and community, and on the other hand as empty shopfronts in high streets. The latter will be a handy reduction in carbon footprint, perhaps, but deliver little else of value. Hence, Paris is considering a tax on this activity, given that 250,000 packages a day are now being delivered in the French capital; in New York, the number is 1.5 million packages per day.

The redistribution after Amazon will be unclear and unequal, without a steering hand from active design-led governance. Nash’s “great tube” of Regent Street will take care of itself, as a well-located, beautifully-executed array of high-end experiences will always be in demand, just as with the Ginza and Fifth Avenue. But these other streets, Barking and Kingsland Road? It’s not so clear.

A street not defined by parking and queues of traffic but instead by vibrant life, whether biodiverse green and blue infrastructure or kids playing football, a far more social space, as if an elongated piazza rather than the constricted motorway it is now.

There is a positive vision here, in which e-commerce is deployed for things that e-commerce is good for, with more coherent shared logistics, working in coordinated fleets of active transport and emission-free small vehicles, reducing individual car traffic as a result, creating space on road and street for more meaningful generative activities than shopping. Shops remain present, if less in volume, for the transactions and experiences that shops are good for, whether a grocer’s laden with local fruit, a high-service experience like a guitar shop, or a crafty packet of cigarettes and a pint of milk at 11pm.

Other challenges proved by new technology, such as autonomous mobility, will also play out on the high street. Again, we have options: shared mobility, autonomous or otherwise, could reduce the number of cars required by 80%, revealing a street not defined by parking and queues of traffic but instead by vibrant life, whether biodiverse green and blue infrastructure or kids playing football, a far more social space, as if an elongated piazza rather than the constricted motorway it is now.