UKH

This is an interesting proposal. I really like the idea and if it goes ahead it will be interesting to see if other towns follow suit. 

My town has an awful shopping centre which has little of any use in it and many empty units. The street outside is already pedestrianised and used for a farmer's market once a month, buskers on it, people sitting out for lunch, a cafe with outdoor seating etc. If we got rid of at least some of the centre and made it more parkland, I think that would be amazing! 

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/feb/11/is-this-the-future-for...

I agree. I've seen lots of UK High Streets in the last few years, often looking like clones of each other with sad-looking closed shops etc. I think anything would improve on that

We can but hope. Would be nice wouldn't it?

But without my local high street where would I go to buy phone cases, e-cigs and charity clothes and phone cases and e-cigs and phone cases and e-cigs and charity clothes? And where would the fleabag-inspired hipster cafes live out their fleeting, optimistically overpriced, barely month-long existence? And what if I need e-cigs and a phone case??? 

I think the cafes are the thing that would do well out of this sort of transformation. I'm picturing various cafes and restaurants around the edge of the open space with street seating for the summer. I guess I'm kind of picturing european town squares etc. It could be really nice. 

Maybe they will still squeeze in a wee shop somewhere for your ecigs and phone cases! 😜

Maybe one of the endless number of nail bars, tattoo parlours or hairdressers could sell them as an under the counter special.  "And would you like something for your, ahem, phone this weekend?".

T.

If they sold them at enormous margin to fictional customers it would be a perfect complement to their money laundering operations. They’d just need a till and a large dustbin. 

Where I live, a council surveyor came round to ask about nightlife provision in the town. This would have been late 80's, early 90's. At the time, the town centre was dead in the evening, barring a couple of dingy pubs. There was a waterway running through town, but it was an industrial wasteland, effectively. I suggested that the town centre ought to be opened up to nightlife, and the waterway made into an amenity, with canalside cafes and restaurants, very much the nice, European atmosphere.

Ten years later, the waterside was redeveloped, with chain bars and restaurants, and a cinema, and all the town centre banks and post office had been turned into kiddy drinking barns. And all the pubs in the surrounding areas had closed. This wasn't quite the transformation I had hoped for...

We just don't seem to be able to do the quiet, European nightlife... Lager frenzy and plastic restaurants seems to be our limit.

The time was a high street was all charity shops and shoe shops punctuated by the odd greasy spoon.  Only one of the greasy spoons I used to frequent in the late 90s remains to this day.