I Left My Heart in Cowes

Cowes High Street

I was on the Isle of Wight last week. It was bloody brilliant. The isle, for many, is like a time capsule, a pickled curio of how we used to live, back in the 50′s or something. Well, I guess that’s how the Tourist Board promote it. I disagree. I do tend to, usually.

I think it’s an experiment in how we should be living in the future. And if so, I can’t wait to get there.

I went for Bestival, but I came away loving that whole island life thing. Self-contained, self-sufficient, self-assured but not, at least not on my watch, selfish.

Cowes is a typical example of the sort of town we’ll all be living in, in the future. It’s so future I was half expecting to see Judith Han demonstrating how a Walkman works from a lectern in the town hall.

There’s a restaurant, along Cowes twisting, cobbled Main Street, called DB’s (it’s excellent, by the way) which is run, successfully, by a husband and wife team. They don’t own a car. They walk to the local shops to get their groceries, and to the wharf for their fish. And don’t look for it on the internet. They don’t have a website. And, even on a Monday night – with no 2-for-1 coupon promotion cut out from the Gazette – it was full.

The stores along the pedestrianised core don’t open from 9am to 9pm – they casually raise their shutters at 10 and, well, when the crowds die down, they’ll call it a day. And they have fascias picked out in gold lettering, not pre-moulded plastic. Each store as unique and tempting as the last. Virtually no chains. No Tesco. No Boots. No WH Smiths. Instead, an independent pharmacist or two, lots of stationers, and family-run greengrocers. OK, there’s a Co-op, but if you’re going to have a supermarket, that’s the one to have.

Liz Earle, Ryde

And Cowes is a financially secure, working, vibrant town. It’s not a museum piece. Same too with neighbouring Ryde, where boutiques, bookshops ironmongers are squeezed into the shopfronts of Union Street. And where too the wonderful Liz Earle (the UK’s most successful independent beauty brand) has her HQ. The Isle of Wight, says Ms Earle, is the perfect place to set up a small business, because, she says, people support them, and will them to succeed.

Tutill-Nichol, Richmond Street

When Tutill Nichol, that grand old Victorian stationers, closed its doors for the last time yesterday after 130 years supplying the city with ledger books, fountain pens and diaries, it made me question just how successful Liverpool ONE has been in resurrecting our city centre from the doldrums (I don’t blame them, incidentally. They’re just indicative of how we’ve lost sight of what our city centres should be).

It sold everything a stationers could sell. It had the friendliest, most helpful staff in the city. And it had a history and dependability you could trust. And still this couldn’t be allowed to succeed amid rising rents and decreasing footfall, as the city’s retail geography shifted south.

In general, I look to Japan for retail industry trends (at least, I do when I’m writing a blog piece about them) – over there, independent retailers are loved, cherished and, most importantly, shopped in. Its department stores and retail giants are steadily losing ground to young, vibrant, independent retailers, and traditional, family-run businesses. Own-manufactured labels are proving to be far more desirable than a glut of new sweat-shop designs from Primark or H&M. Cities, over there, are regaining their individuality. Shopping in Yokohama is starting to look distinct from shopping in Osaka.

Have you noticed how every WH Smith smells the same? Close your eyes next time you’re in there. And do the same when you’re in a branch in Leeds, Edinburgh or Exeter. It’s exactly the same. There was a time when every city centre used to have its own smell. Tuttil Nichol had its own smell. It was a Liverpool smell (and I’m not talking about that hideous drains smell in Whitechapel) just like Coopers Food Hall was. And Watson Prickard. And Microzine.

For every cut price jotter bought in Tescos on Hanover Street, every HB Pencil, shops like Tutill Nichol received another deadly wound, and Liverpool’s historic core of shopping streets (the ‘history’ that Liverpool’s Business Improvement District is so keen to champion in its PR campaign) died just a little more.

It’s a shame, but we’re all complicit.

Has Liverpool been wrong-footed once again? Is the tide turning for the big bad bland chains just as we’re about to open a new Abercrombie and Fitch off-shoot? I do hope so.

We fiercely protect our identity. We’re proud of our accent, our music and our achievements. Why, then, did we donate our historic core to the multinationals, the chain-gangs and the identi-kit malls? And is it too late to say, er, we were wrong?