Blueprint for Stratford - more town centre residents, BHS as an indoor market and a drama school
BACK to the future - that’s at the heart of a compelling vision for the future of high streets across the country by a regeneration specialist who just happens to have a particular passion for his home town of… Stratford.
James Brookes is senior development executive at Complex Development Projects, the firm that has already driven major changes in Leamington’s Cultural Quarter.
But he has also invested time and energy in looking at Stratford and how to bring back a vibrancy to the town centre.
While many choose to moan at the council or owners of the town’s landmark eyesore sites, Mr Brookes is putting the spotlight on how understanding a shift in retail trends some 50 years ago is a critical issue in securing a brighter future for the town.
Those historic changes saw big names move in and take on whole buildings, reducing the opportunity for people to live in the heart of the town.
He believes reversing that practice is vital - and has done a detailed survey of buildings in the town centre to highlight how much living space could be created above ground floor level, potentially bringing hundreds of new residents in to boost the daytime and night-time economy.
A range of barriers would need overcoming but he believes it is a vision that will bring lasting change and is worth pursuing.
It is in this vein he also suggests if Stratford had a world-class drama academy that could bring in thousands of extra people and another obvious boost to the town.
It was an idea he was making tentative enquiries about before covid and believes could still be part of an overall strategy.
He has also had outline discussions with the district council in the past and hopes there could yet be renewed interest in his ideas.
He shared much of his thinking at the recent Wright Hassell Real Estate Conference on Leamington where he was a headline speaker, on the specific issues around high street regeneration.
He said: “I was born and bred in Stratford and seeing the decline of the town centre in particular over the last 15 years is very painful, much the same way as a lot of town centres have declined around the country.
“With a massive proportion of retail acquisitions moving online or out to large retail trade parks with plenty of parking, without parking wardens looking to pick you off on every occasion and more often an ease of access, the high street and the sharp rents of years gone by have led to it being less and less popular.
“Visiting Stratford in the evenings now it is somewhat of a ghost town, the pubs are still there but very few people in them and many of the late-night clubs and bars have closed down or limited their opening hours, the vibrancy has gone.
“People’s habits have changed and previous generations have moved into different stages of their lives, but I started to think about the very heart of the town centre and why that wasn’t so busy, and it occurred to me that this was actually because very few people live in the true town centre.
“If you wind the clock back 50 years, almost every town and city centre was mainly mixed use, with retailers at ground floor and residential above, quite often accommodation for the owners/ operators of the
shops, restaurants, and pubs.
“There were obviously occasions of offices above retail and multiple floors of retail and office, but there was more permanent occupation within high streets.
“The change really started coming about in the 70s, 80s and 90s, when the large retailers started to
take prime place in the UK economy.
“This created perfect investments, large buildings let to a single strong covenant tenant on long-term leases and without the complication of residential being added into the mix.
“Wind forward to the time of the last financial crash and following years, building occupation is changing and profitability of retailers is dropping with the rise of the online giants and consequential strength of the
logistics property market.
“Retailers started to hold less stock in the upper floors and operate more on a just-in-time management system.
“More recently upper floors in many cases are mothballed, the offices and staff rooms are now built into the ground floor back of house instead of being upstairs and stock storage is extremely limited.
“The truth is many high street occupiers would prefer just to be on the ground floor and would happily release back upper floors to cut their rent and business rates liabilities.”
He then outlined the challenges of how these spaces could be returned to residential use, notably that many properties are held by pension funds that cannot have residential holdings by law - but a law that could be changed.
He explained to his audience that he had done a survey of what liberating the upper floors in Stratford town centre could mean.
“Adding all the totals up for all of the streets, this produces potentially 209 units, 364 bedrooms and on 1.5-person occupancy, potentially c550 new residents in the town centre.
“Financially there is an immediate uplift to the values of the properties on the streets.
“Now I am not in any way suggesting that you can deliver all of the apartments, but let’s say 50 per cent was possible, this would produce c100 apartments, 180 bedrooms and c275 living in the centre of Stratford, this creates permanent 365-day occupation.
“It delivers permanent footfall and cross pollination for shops, cafes and restaurants, opens the potential to retro fit historic and unloved buildings, increasing energy efficiencies and building usage, it also removes the requirement to churn up a field on the edge of the town into new housing or at least for the time being. “We have vacant and underused buildings, let us find a way to use them and it will breed far more vibrant town centres.
“We need to turn the clock back 50 years and address mistakes made.”
And what about BHS?
JAMES Brookes also put the spotlight on the BHS building in Stratford, highlighting that before Covid the owner had a well thought-out and funded plan for the building but the funding went with the pandemic and the whole market has changed.
He outlined a vision he was working on with a client before the building was bought by the current owner and believes it could still be a way forward:
“I was trying to convince a client to acquire the building to regenerate it into an indoor marketplace at ground floor with 15 small retail units aimed at local retailers, a café and a microbrewery, and then the upper floor being converted into 44 serviced accommodation pods with parking in the basement.”
And he told the Herald this week that amid the enduring calls for something to be done, there were many issues involved, not least that a main telecoms mast sits on its roof and any movement of that would be expensive.
But he stressed: “It is not the fault of the owner that he has not delivered something.
“He had a structured plan but Covid came along and took away the funding stream.”
