High Street

• 1. Introduction

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  High Street is the most common street name in the United Kingdom, with a 2009 statistical compilation counting 5,410 of them across the country. That number alone hints at something remarkable: a single phrase so embedded in British life that it became both a place and a concept, a specific road and a shorthand for an entire sector of the economy.

  The story of the High Street stretches from the aftermath of the Great Fire of London in 1666, through the golden shopfronts of Victorian England, to a 21st century in which retail spending in High Street shops fell below 50 per cent of all retail spending. How did a term rooted in medieval notions of rank become the spine of British commerce? And what happens to towns when that spine begins to bend?

• 2. The Word Itself

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  In Middle English, the word "high" carried the meaning of superior rank. It attached itself to titles like "high sheriff" and "Lord High Chancellor" and to social categories like "high society." Roads inherited the same logic: "highway" entered the language through the church and their vestries during the 17th century as a term for all public roads connecting settlements.

  By the 19th century, the proliferation of roads had diluted the word "highway" to the point that it was legally defined as any public road at all, as reflected in the Highway Code. "High street," freed from that older meaning, migrated toward a narrower one: the street in a town where the most important shops and businesses were found.

  The Great Fire of London in 1666 accelerated this shift in a concrete way. When the city was rebuilt, new planning laws designated four types of street based on carriageway size and building type. Shops were permitted in the principal street but not in by-lanes or back streets. That regulatory choice, driven partly by the need for visibility to regulate retail trade and partly to avoid congestion in narrow lanes, planted the word "High Street" firmly in the vocabulary of commerce.

• 3. The Victorian Peak

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  Harding, Howell and Co., opened in 1796 on Pall Mall in London, is considered a strong contender for the first department store in Britain. That opening came during a period of rapid growth in consumer expenditure through the late 17th and 18th centuries, and the department store became one of the defining features of major High Streets across the country.

  WHSmith, the bookseller and stationer founded in London in 1792, claims the distinction of being the world's oldest national retail chain. Its rise was part of a broader pattern: the 19th century was described, in contemporary terms, as a "golden era" for High Street shops.

  The rise of the middle class in Victorian England transformed what shopping meant. Streets became places to see and be seen, spaces for recreational browsing and promenading, not merely for purchasing necessities. The Industrial Revolution drew people to cities at an unprecedented rate, and that urbanisation created both the customer base and the architectural ambition that produced the grand High Streets of the Victorian period. By the 20th century, however, the conditions sustaining that golden era had begun to erode.

• 4. Pressures from Outside

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  In the second half of the 20th century, out-of-town shopping centres began pulling trade away from traditional High Street precincts. The popularity of shopping malls in the mid-20th century shifted the balance of retail geography in ways that town planners had not anticipated.

  In the early 21st century, a second wave of disruption arrived in the form of online retailers operating across a global marketplace. Bricks and mortar retailers found themselves competing not with a rival shop on a nearby street but with warehouses and delivery networks at a scale that made direct comparison difficult.

  In 2011, business consultant Mary Portas, best known for the television series Mary Queen of Shops, was commissioned by the UK government to provide an independent review of High Street shopping. Her report cited data showing that retail spending in High Street shops had fallen below 50 per cent of all retail spending. She set out a vision and a series of recommendations. Her plan did not stem the closure of High Street stores, leaving authorities uncertain about how to proceed.

  A House of Commons committee had already framed a related concern in 2006, concluding that the loss of small shops in favour of chain stores was producing what it called "clone towns" and contributing to a loss of sociability.

• 5. Reinvention and Adaptation

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  Research into how customers use town centres produced a description of what a High Street can be beyond a place to buy things. One body of research noted that "the town centre serves not only social, utilitarian or hedonic shopping purposes but also supports out-of-hours entertainment and leisure services." That phrase captures the direction in which some High Streets have been moving.

  Some precincts have contracted as shops have closed. Others have repositioned around cafes, restaurants, and entertainment venues. Still others have moved upmarket, concentrating on stores selling luxury branded goods. Researchers have argued that for High Street retail to survive against the pressure of e-commerce, the sensory and hedonic experiences that a physical visit provides, including scent, touch, and the chance to discover something unexpected in the built environment, need to be actively offered to visitors.

  The town centre in many British towns now combines a group of outdoor shopping streets, at least one of which may be pedestrianised, with an adjacent indoor shopping centre. The phrase "High Street banks" has settled into the language as a descriptor for the retail banking sector in the United Kingdom, distinct from private or investment banks, which is itself a measure of how deeply the term has moved beyond its original geographic meaning.

• 6. A Name Across the World

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  Many former British colonies adopted the term "high street" for their retail shopping areas, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of the United States, particularly New England and especially Massachusetts. In Columbus, Ohio, a street actually named High Street remains a major commercial road, though Americans rarely use the phrase as a general descriptor the way the British do.

  The equivalents in other countries reveal how each culture named the same civic function. In Belgium and the Netherlands, Hoogstraat performs the same role. Cologne's main shopping street is Hohe Strasse, which translates literally to High Street, though it takes its name from a gate at its southern end, the Hohe Pforte, or High Gate, rather than from any commercial designation. In Norway, Storgaten, meaning Grand Street, serves the same function, and in Sweden both Storgatan and Drottninggatan, meaning Queen's Street, are common equivalents.

  In Ireland, neither of Dublin's two main shopping streets, Grafton Street and Henry Street, carry the High Street name, nor does its principal thoroughfare, O'Connell Street. The Irish OSI North Leinster Town Maps book lists sixteen Main Streets against only two High Streets in its thirty-town index. Yet some Irish towns do have a major shopping street named High Street, including Killarney, Galway, Wexford, and Kilkenny. In Bantry, County Cork, the main shopping street is literally called High Street in its western part and Main Street in its eastern part, the two names meeting somewhere in the middle of a single road.