David Rudlin.

The Chair: Welcome to this meeting of the House of Lords Built Environment Committee. This is the eighth evidence session of our inquiry into high streets in towns and small cities. Our witness today is David Rudlin, the director of urban design at BDP, a large architectural practice with associated professional services.

Q130 Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: How would you define a high street in a town or small city? You have obviously given a lot of thought to this since you wrote your book—I must admit I have not read it yet, but I will after this session. What is the purpose of the high street, and how do you feel it has changed?

David Rudlin: The work we have done on this is through the 1851 Commission, which I was fellow of for two years over lockdown. My fellow author is in the public gallery and the other author is your adviser, so the book is hopefully a useful starting point. It is surprisingly difficult to define a high street. When the news talks about the ‘crisis on the high street’, it is talking about retailing generally, and it wraps up in that all out-of-town stores and so on—the high street is everything as far as the media is concerned.

In a traditional sense, the high street was the main street through the middle of every town—that is why it is called the high street. The shops were there because that is where all the people were. In a town, there is obviously more than one street—there is a town centre, which is often defined in the local plan in terms of where the high street is.

The Ordnance Survey has done an exercise that you may want to look at. It defined 6,000 high streets in the UK statistically. “A run of 120 metres with continuous shopping” is what it has used as its definition to create a statistical basis for high streets. You can tell from that data how many shops there are, how many people live there, how many businesses there are and so on. So there is a statistical method of defining it.

The high street’s purpose has always been, as we have known, to serve its community: to provide services and public administration—the council—as well as to provide retailing, markets, health and so on. The problem with high streets is that retailing has come to dominate everything, certainly this century. In the early 2000s, a particular type of retailing—big retail and the large chain stores—came to dominate everything. Because it was the most valuable, it pushed all those other uses out. Now that it is suffering, we are struggling with having lost all those other uses. The high street should be a much more rounded community facility to serve all your daily needs, and we need to get back to that.

Q131 Lord Bailey of Paddington: From your perspective, which is more important for a successful high street: good urban design or shops and services that are offered there?

David Rudlin: I remember once walking around Burslem, which is one of the six towns of Stoke-on-Trent, and it was absolutely immaculate. The public realm was beautiful, but every shop was closed. There is no point having a beautiful public realm if you do not have shops. So hopefully it is not a choice between one or the other, and hopefully you can have both. But councils have focused on improving the environment, partly because they have control over this, and they have not understood that that it needs to be part of a wider strategy to fill the shops again. If the shops are not full and active, and if the roller shutters are down, it does not matter how beautiful your environment is. So you need to do both. There are occasions where good environments can improve and help shops be reoccupied, but it is not automatic. You haveto think about much wider issues. One would hope that we could have both, but certainly do not neglect the shops: they need to be occupied and trading.

Lord Bailey of Paddington: When you say “shops”, do you include wider services? You talked about councils et cetera.

David Rudlin: I mean stuff within buildings—all those things. In the first answer, I said that shops are not the whole answer. Even if the shop is to be occupied by an architect’s office, for example, I say: just occupy the space. The space needs to be occupied. Roller shutters have a deadening effect on high streets.

Q132 Lord Bailey of Paddington: Are there some elements of high street design that can help to increase footfall, the resilience of towns and cities, and the economic focus that makes them good places to be?

David Rudlin: The first thing to say is that high streets are there because there was footfall. The footfall came first, and the shops came second. Space syntax, which is a mapping process that looks at the connectivity of streets, shows that the streets that are most connected on a space syntax plan are the ones where you find the shops. The most connected street in London is Oxford Street on a space syntax plan. I am sure we will come on to connections and traffic in a moment in this evidence session, but making sure you have those connections to make sure people are around is absolutely crucial.

One of the things that has happened on a lot of high streets is that the flow of people has been interrupted by, for example, pedestrianising the high street. I can give examples of high streets that have died because the traffic has been excluded and because the people no longer know it is there, so it is not driving footfall. We have replaced this with a shopping centre mentality. Shopping malls were invented in America, and the idea was to put a department store at either end to drive footfall, and then to fill the middle bit with shops that fed off the footfall that came from the department stores. We have been designing town centres like that, putting a shopping centre at one end with a department store, often in a very unpromising location, on the basis that the strength of the department store will draw people to it and generate footfall. Of course, that department store was often a Debenhams, which is now gone because Debenhams has disappeared. Without that anchor, the whole idea falls apart. Stafford, for example, did this, with a new shopping centre in an off-centre location with a Debenhams, which then closed down. The old part of town died and the new part of town is not thriving because the draw is no longer there. So that does not work; you need to do it in the old-fashioned way.

Q133 Baroness Eaton: You mentioned local authorities in your answer to Lord Bailey. How can they balance providing access to high streets for cars, cyclists and pedestrians in towns and small cities?

David Rudlin: I used to be a director of URBED, as was my fellow author Vicky Payne. Back in 1996, we did a report for the Government called Vital and Viable Town Centres, which was a ground-breaking report on town centres. We said that a town centre’s success is based upon Access, Amenity, Attractions and Action—the four ‘A’s. The first two are really important - attractions and access work in tandem with each other. If you have strong attractions—in York, for example—you can make access quite difficult and people will still come, come what may. If it means parking in a park-and-ride car park five miles away and getting a bus, they will do that because they want to be in York. If you are in a centre that has got weak attractions, the last thing you want to do is make it harder to get there. The car then becomes quite important.

I take the chair’s point about the fact that, in a big city, people can walk and get public transport, but, in smaller towns and in rural areas, people will be driving, and you therefore have to accommodate that. It sometimes goes against your first principles of saying you want to reduce car use, but you do need to accommodate the car, albeit not in every spot. If you talk to traders, they will always say there is not enough car parking, that they need more parking and that, if you take a few spaces away, it will be the end of the town. They are often wrong: there is often too much parking when you actually look at the numbers and how the parking is used. Make the car parking efficient, putting it in one place that is well located and not in every little bit of the town. Organise it properly, but do not take it away completely.

Q134 Baroness Eaton: How, then, do local authorities balance the allocation of those kinds of spaces for cars and cycles?

David Rudlin: I have been in high streets where there has been parking on the high street. I asked whose cars they were and realised that they belonged to the shopkeepers. What you do not want is people working in the town parking there. They need to park on the edge of the town if they need to park. You keep the short-term spaces for customers.

One of our case studies was Ashington in the north-east. Being the biggest pit village in the world is its claim to fame. It pedestrianised its high street some time ago and, recently, it reopened it to traffic. Traffic has been taken one way through the high street with chevroned, short-stay parking. That has done a lot of good to the street because people can pop in, park for 15 minutes, get something from the shops and then go off. Sometimes, things like that are actually quite useful. You need to understand your centre, how attractive you are, where people come from and how they travel. You need to be sensible about how you cater for that.

Baroness Eaton: So obviously it is local decisions based on local knowledge and local use, rather than a blanket “this is how it works” kind of approach.

David Rudlin: This is true of everything—every town centre is different. We did 100 case studies and got data on all of them. Those that were struggling most and that had the highest vacancy rates were the ones you are looking at: the larger towns and small cities. The big cities were doing okay because they had the huge draw. The towns were doing okay because they never had Debenhams or the big stores: there were always the independents there. It was the ones in the middle that were relying on the department stores and the multiples, which have declined. So somewhere like Doncaster, which has lost four department stores and is really struggling—whereas Barnsley, just down the road, never had the department stores and is doing okay. Every town is different in terms of how it operates.

Q135 Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: I want to focus on the issue of safety. Perhaps you could say something about the design elements that help to make city high streets not only welcoming but safe for all groups, including the elderly and younger people. I would like to link that with a question about the night economy and what specific thing we should consider in relation to it.

David Rudlin: The key thing about safety is busyness. People talk about the ‘sanitation of the human gaze’. Even if you are not actually being overlooked, the feeling that you might be overlooked causes people to behave much better. So busy high streets are, by definition, much safer than empty ones. Roller shutters and so on are very bad because even if it is not unsafe it feels unsafe. Having life and activity is important.

There is also a big debate about CCTV, which we have a lot of in the UK. In a sense, that operates because people feel that they may be being overlooked but it does not work in quite the same way. It is not anything like as effective as having people around you who might overlook and intervene. That is crucial. If your high street is in decline and you have no control over the fact that there are no people there, you have to look at other means of doing this: creating animation, having events, organising markets and all that type of thing. The answer is almost always activity.

The exception to that is the second part of the question: the night-time. There have been problems with certain towns becoming over-dominated by the night-time economy. The balance is quite difficult. Hard drinking, night clubs and the streets becoming dominated by people who are drunk, anti-social behaviour and so on has become an issue in quite a few towns, not just the big cities. That is a matter of balance. Where we have worked in cities like that, we have talked about trying to move the balance back to more family-oriented or dining-based, rather than drinking-based, experiences. The night-time economy is good, but you can have too much of it and it can get out of control. Licensing also has role to play in that.

Unfortunately, safety is a symptom of decline, so it is not that easy to solve in a situation that is in decline, if you understand me. Safety is not a problem if you have a successful centre.

Q136 Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: I will link that point about being overlooked. We have not raised the issue of additional housing on the high street and using it for those purposes. There are all sorts of planning and quality issues involved but what is your view about the balance of having people living on the high street, either above the shops or in separate accommodation?

David Rudlin: It is a good thing. There should be a mix of uses and a mix of housing. We always used to have housing in the centre of our cities and towns and I see no reason why we should not continue that. The prospect that someone is living up there with the lights on is going to make the place feel safer.

There are potential conflicts. In Manchester, where I am based, there has been a big issue recently with one of the oldest bars, Night and Day, and a residential complaint from someone living just behind it. Both sides in that issue are right: Night and Day is an institution in Manchester and very much part of the city centre, but the resident amenity was also unacceptable. I think it has now been resolved. One has to be a bit careful about mixing housing with the night-time economy, but you can do that if you are careful.

The Chair: On that point, where I live in Kensington, every retail street has people living above it and it works quite well. There are lights on and people coming and going. The idea of total separation has a deadening effect; you lose the passive overlooking that contributes to a sense of safety, even at night.

David Rudlin: I agree entirely.

Q137 Viscount Hanworth: I understand that you are the illustrator of the high street book—the pictures are exquisite. What can be done to improve urban design within the scope of existing street layouts and uses? Can you also talk about the model design code within this context? What is its purpose?

David Rudlin: I was also the author of the national model design code—it is one of the other strings to my bow—along with Vicky Payne, sitting behind me. Good design, good architecture and urban design are often confused. I am quite agnostic about architecture; I like all types and do not mind modern buildings at all. I am very traditional about urban design. Buildings need to face on to streets and have active frontages, by which we mean shop fronts or windows on to the streets. They should not have blank frontages or turn their backs to the streets. They should respect existing street networks. That is a very traditional way in which to design towns and cities. It is traditional for a reason—because it works, and because it creates safe, lively environments that are a pleasure to be in, walk around and so on.

The national model design code is about those basic rules of urban design. You can design a building in any style that you want but you need to follow the basic rules about how the building relates to the street, the town and so on. Those things are very important when it comes to designing anywhere, not just town centres. New housing areas and so on also need to follow the same rules.

Viscount Hanworth: The code seems to be mostly a typology and is hardly prescriptive, although it is subtly prescriptive in some sense. Can you clarity that?

David Rudlin: It is fixed and loose fit, if you will. It creates very firm rules with lots of wiggle room within them. You can do lots of things within the rules but the rules themselves are fixed. For example, with a building line—a technical urban design term meaning the front face of a building as it faces a street—you can be fixed and say it must follow that building line. That is what any building in a historic city would have done. But, within that building, you can build in any style that you want. There may not be an issue about how high it is: how you do that is up to you. However, certain things are fixed, but, within those, there is lots of flexibility to do what you want.

Viscount Hanworth: You do not like meaningless gaps between buildings.

David Rudlin: No.

Viscount Hanworth: In post-war Britain, there has been a succession of urban architectural styles that have dominated for long periods. First, there was the Le Corbusier modernism. I notice that, in our portrait of you, you are wearing his glasses.

David Rudlin: Yes, I am sorry. Shall I put my Le Corbusier glasses on? I would be happy to do that—there you go.

Viscount Hanworth: There they are. This was succeeded after a while by a kind of post-modernist toytown architecture. Do you perceive anything in the offing now that will supervene and dominate? Will it produce a hazard? As we have heard, buildings from the 1960s and 1970s in the Le Corbusier style have wrecked the appearance of many British towns.

David Rudlin: As I say, I am agnostic. Modernism works very well as an architectural style but is a disaster as an urban design style. Le Corbusier famously said that cafés are the fungus that pollutes streets. He had no time for streets at all. His urban design work was very antithetical to urbanism, retailing and those sorts of things. When we used Le Corbusier to build, for example, the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth as a modernist shopping centre, all the life was inside; it did not relate to the streets outside at all. It did huge damage to the life of the town. It was just about retailing.

Again, post-modernism is an architectural style. It tended to be more traditional in terms of its weight relating to urban design. Nowadays, there is a whole range of architectural styles. There are some extremely good ones around, modern and traditional. There is also much more respect for the street and urban design principles than there once was. I am quite hopeful, I think.

Viscount Hanworth: So you would not be averse to any sort of dominant style.

David Rudlin: We are into a much more plural situation at the moment in terms of how things are designed.

Q138 Baroness Andrews: This is completely at the other end of the spectrum. Talking of how buildings connect generally with their environment, we have such a rich historic environment. Indeed, we probably have more thanks not least to English Heritage and Historic England putting more assets to work and repurposing buildings. Do you think we can do more? Are we doing enough? What do we have to do to get local authorities that do not see their historic environment as an asset on the high street to repurpose buildings? Will it take resources or different planning?

David Rudlin: I have not come across any local authorities that do not get that, to be honest. It is generally something that people very much value in terms of their high streets. Continuity is really important, and town centres are where continuity is most visible. You can see the history in our town centres in a way that you cannot necessarily in our suburbs and so on. One of the great advantages of traditional high streets, as opposed to a big shopping centre, is that you have buildings of different ages. You have character and identity. You have a sense of place. Shopping centres sometimes try to replicate that but it is just fake, is it not? The reality is much more authentic. The heritage high street fund has done really good work on a lot of those things, such as improving buildings and improving the public realm.

On what the previous witness said, we got the impression that British towns are not very good and continental towns are much better. We know about the good continental towns, but there are equally bad towns on the continent, in Holland and so on. There are some terrible examples of towns. There are some brilliant examples in the UK, actually, particularly in our town centres. Our book is broadly optimistic. We have gone through a retail crisis since 2018 and things have been very bad, but our towns were improving quite rapidly prior to that and a lot of them are now bouncing back. There are some really good examples in the UK of towns that have recovered. Many of them are historic; history is quite an important ingredient in that success.

Q139 Baroness Andrews: Do you think that one of the reasons why some of them are not bouncing back—this applies to historic buildings as well—is that our planning is getting too permissive?

David Rudlin: Yes, I do.

Baroness Andrews: I mean in the sense that we have had a lot of deregulation around the planning system. Is that making it easier for people to get away with not doing some of the obvious things, for example in relation to repurposing buildings? Is there a relationship there?

David Rudlin: The issue is the use class. We now have use class E, which encompasses all town centres uses plus light industry, offices and so on. Whereas previously we had a retail use, a café use and an office use, they are now all part of the same thing, so you can change between all those uses without planning permission. Now, you can also change from that use class to residential, provided that the unit has been vacant for three months and you get prior permission. That is potentially disastrous. The idea of taking a greengrocer out of the heart of a high street and turning it into housing will only damage that high street if it is permitted. So permissive planning is a problem.

We have found no evidence whatever of planners holding back a high street through restrictive planning practice. In our experience, planners were only too happy to try to allow the high street to flex and change as it needed to. So the idea that planning was the problem and you need to be more permissive to allow the high street to recover is a complete cul-de-sac and will be counterproductive.

Q140 Lord Mawson: What, if any, is the role of local and central government in delivering well-designed places? As a supplementary to that, are we, here in the Palace of Westminster, getting in the way with endless legislation and looking at lots of details but not looking at the cumulative effect? That is part of my question.

Next, what is the role of planning policy in urban design? How can public sector groups and private sector groups work together effectively?

David Rudlin: There are quite a few elements to that. The first thing is that the Government’s funding for the future high streets programme is significant. After the Portas review, the allocation was a few million pounds. By contrast about £1 billion has been spent on high streets from the Future High Streets Fund, and more through the Towns Fund. That is very significant money. It is probably the only money about in that field at the moment; all the old urban programmes have gone so that is basically all there is.

Lord Mawson: Is it actually getting spent?

David Rudlin: It is getting spent, but whether it is getting spent effectively is a moot point. It is getting spent effectively in some places. Places will typically get between £15 million and £20 million, which is quite a lot of money. I am not always convinced that funds are being spent as effectively as they could be. In my view, as I have said, it needs to be part of a diagnosis of what it is about that centre that is the issue and how it can change, rather than just saying, “This is a blanket policy for town centres and therefore it should be applied”.

As with all government funding, the competition with which it is allocated is very draining on local government resources. There must be better ways of doing that. It plays councils off against each other and the people who are better at bidding get the money, rather than the people in greatest need. There are issues there, certainly.

You asked about local government. It is absolutely crucial. Local government is the main player in many town centres. Others have talked about local government getting involved even more by buying up land. In a sense, local government is often a facilitator rather than someone who needs to get directly involved. Things like taking leases on shops and putting them back out into the market are very good things that local government can do.

Similarly, one of the metaphors that we use is creating fertile ground for things to happen. You do not necessarily know what will happen. This is actually Vicky’s metaphor. We talked about a long-term vision and plan. In a sense, sure, you can have that, but what you need to do is create the right conditions for growth to happen. Sometimes things that you did not expect will flourish; for example, someone will come and open a shop that you never thought would work but it does and becomes something that grows into other things. Facilitating things is the role of local government.

On business, I saw at the weekend that there was backlash against business improvement districts. Certain retailers were asking, “Why are we paying money into this when we have no control over it?” There are some very good business improvement districts and some very poor ones, but local businesses coming together and working collectively is an important part of town centres. That was the action of our four ‘A’s when we talked about it back in the day.

We saw a good example in Colchester of where the local business group had come together and revived one of the high streets there. It did so almost in the face of opposition from the business improvement district, actually; sometimes these things happen in an informal way.

Q141 Lord Mawson: In this place, we are endlessly meddling in all of this. Are we getting in the way?

David Rudlin: In terms of devolution, yes, there is definitely a case that this place does not necessarily understanding every centre. Well, it cannot possibly do that, can it? Therefore, the devolution of funding decisions more locally is a good thing because every town centre is very different.

Q142 Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: This is more out of interest than anything else, but I note that a lot of the projects you have undertaken have been in university towns. Do you see any additional benefit there? These are small towns, but there are now quite a lot of higher education institutions in small towns, and they become major employers and the staff need housing. Are you beginning to see any relationship with the role of higher education institutions as they spread much more widely?

David Rudlin: There is a huge relationship, not just in the town centres but from an urban regeneration and renaissance perspective generally. We are working at the moment in Stockton-on-Tees, which has an outpost of Durham University. The number of young people leaving Stockton when they get to university age is startling, so a lot of the brightest young people tend to leave. If you have a university, you are attracting those people. They have spending power and will go on to create businesses, and they always end up loving the place where they went to university, so they have a well of affection for the place they were at. Higher education is really important.

Again, if you have a university and there is the opportunity, bring it into your town centre rather than having it on a peripheral campus. It is one of those things: if you have stuff going on, try to do it in your town centre if you can, because that is what generates life and activity.

The Chair: Mr Rudlin, thank you very much indeed for that. That is the end of our evidence session. We are very grateful to you for the time you have given to us. It has been very informative and helpful for us. Thank you very much.