In the local rag today I was proper shocked to read something about an initiative coming from the council that I was actually excited about. The headline was ‘It’s Back To The Future‘ (which was bound to catch my attention anyway) and it detailed the council’s plan to spend nearly a million quid on restoring the shop fronts in the old end of town “to their Victorian and Edwardian glory” to, guess what, attract business. My mind is in two places at once on this. Here are the two places that make up this quantum opinion…

Quantum Opinion #1

I was once walking down Sadlergate (more about Sadlergate later) and, I think it was the butcher’s shop that had just closed down and was becoming one of the high-fashion shops (that are now closed down, but more about that later as well), and the ugly eighties plastic hoarding had been ripped out to make way for a new pretty wooden/plaster one. Underneath you could see the old Sadler’s hoarding from god-knows-when-ago, all old tar coloured wood with faded gold letters. Someone’s initials and surname, almost definitely a dealer in some horse related paraphernalia from when the street would have smelt like a hundred horses’ arses, from all the horses arses shitting all over the place as they got their hooves and saddles and whatnot seen to.

It was a kind of Proustian rush back to a time I’ve only seen one faded photo of in a book about old Derby. I go in search for those sights a lot. The bits that have never changed. Even restored building are enough, so that all you have to do is squint to see back to before cars when there were trams, and before trams when there were horses and the roads were soil…

Quantum Opinion #2

Having thought about it all day, I can still say that this is a good idea. But a few things strike me as odd, and these things make the ‘good idea’ come apart at the seams.

Take the previously mentioned Sadlergate. It’s a beautiful street that’s up there in old beauty with York. The shop fronts are all very nicely done up and for the most part the buildings are really well maintained. One thing that strikes you at the moment about these shop fronts though is that they’re empty. There are no shops in them. There are still shops open on Sadlergate, but the ratio of open ones to closed-down ones is getting more even every week. So, if one part of town that already looks nice can’t attract business as it is, how is making another part that doesn’t look as nice look as nice as the one that already looks nice going to attract any more?

By travelling in time, the council are trying to retrace their steps to before they signed off on Westfield building what Charlie Brooker perfectly described as a “hollow, anaesthetising capitalist moonbase”. Business in the actual city centre has been going downhill pretty steadily since the Big Grey Block appeared on the skyline, and will continue to do so until someone pulls it down/blows it up, or better: until businesses reject it for what it is and move back to somewhere with a soul. I’m not ignorant, I know rents are high outside of the moonbase, I know the footfall is less than half that of in there, but venture into the sunlight one by one and see how much better lunchtime is in the market square that in Logan’s Run’s food hall.

So, rather than spending a million on architecture, maybe spend a fraction of that on some consultancy between landlords and businesses. Strike up some deals. Make some introductions. The age of the bricks won’t attract business if the books don’t balance on paper. Fix what you’ve broken before building something new, because going back in time aesthetically is not time travel.