Why shops did not save our town centres

Does your town centre feature a run-down shopping centre, some 1960s council offices and forlorn shops? Is the housing concentrated in suburban cul-de-sacs, poorly integrated with the centre? Has a promised regeneration scheme failed to materialise? Your town is suffering from a recession-related malaise — arrested development.

Since the 1990s, much town-centre building, once the preserve of the council, has been powered by a marriage of convenience between local authorities and private developers. Councils found that they could meet government housebuilding targets and affordable-housing quotas and provide all the services these require — shops, health centres, bus services — by contracting them out to developers, who could comfortably afford to deduct the cost from the large profits that they made from property sales and commercial rents.

The benefit to councils was enormous. In the heady days of April 2007, a spokesman for Stanhope, a development company involved in the regeneration of Hereford, Croydon, Ashford, Stevenage and Bracknell, told The Times that it had agreed to provide Bracknell council with “a new library, museum, council offices, bus station, car parking and repairs to public squares and streets”. In retrospect, his comment that “these can be quite marginal projects, viability-wise”, seems an understatement.