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IS THE HIGH STREET DYING?
There’s no doubt about it, if you take the rents landlords
are charging into account, Lewes High Street,
including the ‘top end of town’, is a ‘hot’ place for
commerce.
One soon-to-be-empty shop on the High Street, for
example, is currently being offered an annual rent of
£425 per metre squared of retail space. Perfect likefor-like
comparisons are hard to engineer, but shop
space in broadly comparable locations in Haywards
Heath are available for £277 per square metre, and
j<strong>us</strong>t £224 per square metre in Burgess Hill. A shop
bang on the High Street in Kingston upon Thames
is only £398 per metre squared.
This wasn’t always the case: prices have ballooned
over the years, and are still ballooning.
Price increases can be down to two factors: high demand
(ie prices rising as a lot of shops want to move
into the area and are prepared to pay top dollar to
do so) or low supply (ie there are not enough shops).
We believe, from both anecdotal and statistical evidence,
that the demand for shop space in Lewes is
extremely high: when a place closes down, in other
words, the space is soon filled by another b<strong>us</strong>iness,
and there are plenty of b<strong>us</strong>inesses itching to get into
town.
But, crucially, there is also increasingly low supply:
fewer and fewer commercial premises are up
for grabs. This is largely beca<strong>us</strong>e shops are being
given permission by the District Council planning
department for ‘change of <strong>us</strong>e’, and being converted
into private residences. This is particularly happening
at the top of town, which is considered by the
department to be less important to ‘hang onto’ than
premises closer to the Eastgate precinct, which they
view as being the commercial centre of town.
Once such ‘change of <strong>us</strong>e’ permission is granted,
the decision is almost irreversible: private property
is worth so much more than commercial property
in the current climate, nobody in their right mind
would convert a ho<strong>us</strong>e into a shop.
Interestingly, the Council benefits from properties
becoming residential, beca<strong>us</strong>e it keeps the income
from residential rates, while it has to pass commercial
rates, which it collects, onto Westminster.
Is the practice to the benefit of the town? Absolute-
b i g i s s u e
ly not. And not j<strong>us</strong>t beca<strong>us</strong>e of the poor individual
shopkeepers struggling to make ends meet in such
an environment (and we haven’t even addressed the
issue of rates here, which have in some cases doubled
in the last five-yearly assessment). The more
shops shut, the less ‘footfall’ there will be, and the
harder will become the surviving shopkeepers’ lot.
After a while, there’s a certain ‘tipping point’, where
there aren’t enough c<strong>us</strong>tomers to keep any shops
going. Do we really want the High Street to become
a residential quarter, with a nice castle in the middle
of it?
We don’t want to point fingers at any individual cases
where this practice, which is perfectly legal, has
occurred. But we want to <strong>us</strong>e this space to appeal to
the LDC Planning Committee to think again before
allowing any more ‘changes of <strong>us</strong>e’, before the
situation gets out of hand. They might have decided
that the top of town is expendable as a commercial
centre, but that doesn’t mean we have to take their
policy lying down. Every ‘change of <strong>us</strong>e’ judgement
is another nail in the High Street’s coffin, and we
don’t want to witness the commercial death of the
traditional centre of town.
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