AAA White Paper The political economy of informal events, 2030 | Page 67

67
painters, poets, cooks, jugglers, clowns – retailers and city
managers can make shopping hubs into destinations that are more
compelling than those of the past. The idea: to persuade individuals
and families that their journey to the High Street is worthwhile,
because half a day there will include live attractions that they
cannot get on social media, TV or the Web, and that are often free.
Who will pay for informal events in and around the High Street?
Edinburgh Council wants to be able to collect up to £14.6m from a
room tax on tourists – Airbnb users included – of £2 a night. Yet it is far
from certain what, if any of this rather modest sum of money might be
spent on, say, new spaces for events – let alone how much Edinburgh
Council might want to spend bringing informal events more firmly to
the centre of the city’s mainstream, year-round retailing.
Taxes on tourists are unlikely to be the most effective way to fund a
major reorientation of the country’s retailers toward informal events.
The best result would be for High Streets to generate enough footfall
to pay for themselves.
With the right sounds, sights, displays, air quality, tastes and
smells, tomorrow’s High Street will bring communities continual
innovations around performing arts and sport. It will find room, too,
for 2D and 3D printing, laser cutting and Virtual Reality: Birmingham
City University’s STEAMhouse facilities already provide these things
on Digbeth High Street. On tomorrow’s main drag, indeed, there
might even be room for book-and-walk-in flight simulators. Already a
main road into Putney, South London, boasts one of these.
The High Street needs to take informal events seriously. The
Association of Town and City Management (ATCM) certainly does: it
believes that night-time entertainment is a vital part of helping the
High Street. What’s more, many local authorities today have a direct
interest in using events to shape a new kind of retailing. Having
bought up shopping centres from Shrewsbury through to Bolton,
Wigan and Surrey Heath, local authorities now need to build up a
whole culture of events at places like these – if, that is, they really want
to their shopping thoroughfares to survive.
In the future, the anchor tenant of new retail developments
won’t always be Marks & Spencer. That key role will often also be
played by informal events, held in the public realm. In the years to
2030, every kind of shopping centre in the UK should contain and
continually develop a space that’s devoted to such events.