In the past few months, while promoting a new book, I’ve been spending more time on the road than usual, visiting bookshops and festivals around Scotland. What has struck me, more forcefully than ever, is the oddly hollowed-out atmosphere of so many town and city centres.
So often walking down the high street you’ll find only a motley assortment of charity shops, tired-looking banks and pound stores. About 40 per cent of town centre buildings in Scotland are thought to be empty.
New retail parks are built to a staggering scale; everything supersized. Shops are no longer shops but warehouse-sized stores, every one of them owned and operated by a national or multinational chain.
There are so many reasons to deplore the proliferation of these cities within cities that have grown like tumours in the outskirts. My aesthetic objections may be a matter of taste, but the environmental ones are not. These developments create seas of tarmac where before were fields and woods and scrub. Their space-inefficient design leaves them impractical for shoppers who are on foot or using public transport. They drain the life from struggling town centres, reducing footfall in high streets, and encourage a more sedentary lifestyle.
The retail parks are damaging in another, more intangible, way: the flattening of local identity, the stripping away of the distinctiveness of place. When every town has Identikit outlets of H&M, Hobbycraft, Sports Direct and Mountain Warehouse; when every weekend might be spent going to the Odeon before dinner at Frankie & Benny’s — what is to differentiate here from there? Why live in one place instead of any other?
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Some towns are bucking the trend: North Berwick, for example, with its vibrant and largely independent town centre. Elsewhere residents are raging against the dying of the light. In Dumfries a community project has been buying and redeveloping a strip of empty high street shops to create the Midsteeple Quarter, while the Stove Network, an artist-led community development trust, runs cafés, events and public art aimed at bringing people into the centre. Their ambition and vision must be applauded.
Convenience is gratifying, but it comes at a cost. If our towns and cities are to retain their identities — their charm, their liveability — it’s to their centres that we must direct our efforts.
Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn is published by HarperCollins at £9.99