Written evidence submitted by Deborah Alma to the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee [RHS 019]
Summary
High streets thrive when they give people a reason to choose them. In smaller and rural towns, that reason may be atmosphere, culture, landscape, hospitality, independent retail and human connection rather than the complete range of practical shops once supported by the local population alone.
My evidence is based on establishing the Poetry Pharmacy in Bishop's Castle, subsequently opening in York city centre and running a concession inside Lush on London’s Oxford Street, and helping to organise Bishop's Castle Is Open, a locally led project using empty and underused premises for art, retail and cultural activity.
The central lesson is that regeneration cannot be achieved through public realm improvements alone. Attractive paving and street furniture cannot compensate for dark windows, inaccessible premises or a shortage of people able to take a risk on an idea. Policy should make it easier to inhabit, borrow, test and gradually occupy these high-street buildings.
Recommendations
1. Place mixed residential-commercial buildings at the centre of high-street policy, including encouraging lenders to better finance people who want to live above and operate a business below.
2. Create a simple national framework for meanwhile and short-term use, with proportionate leases, insurance, utilities and planning requirements.
3. Fund local coordinators and practical delivery, not only capital works. Small projects often depend on substantial unpaid labour that cannot be sustained indefinitely.
4. Give greater weight to cultural identity, independent businesses and community activity when allocating regeneration funding.
5. Design business-rates support to provide certainty and avoid abrupt cost increases that small businesses cannot absorb.
6. Encourage reciprocal partnerships between larger retailers and small independents, including pop-ups, concessions, shared audiences, mentoring and access to space.
1. Background and experience
I am a poet and editor and the founder of the Poetry Pharmacy, a retail and wellbeing business built around words. Our first permanent shop opened in Bishop's Castle, a small rural town in south Shropshire. We now also operate in York and as a concession inside the Lush flagship store on Oxford Street in London.
The Bishop's Castle shop combines books, poetry products, a small cafe, events and opportunities for conversation. It is both a business and a form of social and cultural space. Customers do not necessarily visit because they need a conventional retail item. They come because the experience is distinctive and because the shop offers an emotional and imaginative encounter that cannot be replicated online.
Bishop's Castle is economically improbable in conventional terms. It has a small population, no railway station, not even an A- road that goes past it and limited passing trade. But it also has busy pubs, live music, festivals, theatre, talks, independent shops and a strong creative identity. People travel to the town deliberately. That distinction between passing footfall and chosen destination is important to understanding smaller high streets.
2. Successful regeneration begins with identity
A frequent question in high-street policy is what businesses a town needs. That is important, but in a place such as Bishop's Castle there is an equally important question: why would somebody choose to come here?
The older model of a small town sustained predominantly by the everyday shopping needs of its resident population has been weakened by online retail, supermarket consolidation, car dependency, rising costs and shrinking margins. Regeneration cannot simply recreate that model by wishing for a familiar list of shops.
Bishop's Castle demonstrates that people will travel for somewhere distinctive. They come for atmosphere, beauty, conversation, music, books, walking, wild swimming, festivals, folklore and a sense that something human is happening. The most promising regeneration strategies identify and strengthen the character that already exists, rather than imposing a generic retail formula.
Clustering is therefore not inherently harmful. A cluster of complementary independent, cultural or hospitality businesses can create a destination and a mutually reinforcing identity. The harm arises when a concentration of outlets narrows the range of the high street, weakens its relationship with local identity, creates visual neglect, or makes residents feel that decisions are being made without them. Planning powers may help prevent damaging concentrations, but they cannot curate a thriving high street by themselves. Communities also need the ability to enable the businesses and activities they do want.
3. Living above the shop can make risk possible
Our original experiment in Bishop's Castle was possible because we lived above the shop. We combined home and work in one building with one mortgage. This arrangement, once ordinary across Britain, reduced the cost and risk of testing an unusual business in a very small town.
Living above shops also makes high streets inhabited places. There are lights upstairs after closing time, greater informal stewardship and more daily life in the centre of town. It can support flexible working patterns and hybrid rural livelihoods that combine retail, events, hospitality, making, writing, workshops, tourism and online income.
The obstacle in our experience was finance. Although we were financially stable and could afford an ordinary residential mortgage, securing lending on a mixed residential-commercial property was extremely difficult. The available specialist products carried higher costs and risk assumptions. The finance system treated living above one's own shop as unusual and unstable, when it was the arrangement that made the business viable.
Many small towns retain buildings that are especially suited to this model, with commercial space below and accommodation above. Government should work with lenders to develop accessible mixed-use mortgage products and should support the renovation and return to use of flats above shops. High-street policy should see the whole building, not only the fascia at pavement level.
4. Meanwhile use and Bishop's Castle Is Open
Empty shopfronts communicate decline. They reduce confidence, weaken neighbouring businesses and can become part of the story a town tells about itself. Yet waiting for the perfect long-term tenant can leave useful buildings dark for years.
Bishop's Castle Is Open is a locally organised initiative designed to activate empty and underused premises during the town's Michaelmas Fair as a pilot, and if successful beyond that. Artists, makers and organisations are being brought into spaces across the town, alongside open studios, installations and cultural activity. The project tests what can happen when vacant premises become visible parts of the town's creative life rather than symbols of failure.
At the time of submitting this evidence the event has not yet taken place, so I do not claim outcomes that have not been measured. The organising process has nevertheless already revealed recurring barriers: identifying and contacting owners, agreeing access, coordinating keys and set-up, obtaining suitable insurance, arranging payment and staffing, assessing the condition and accessibility of spaces, producing signage and publicity, and ensuring that temporary users understand their responsibilities.
These tasks require time, trusted local relationships and a coordinator. Small communities may have abundant imagination but limited administrative capacity. Funding schemes that pay for physical improvements while assuming organisation will be provided voluntarily overlook a central cost of delivery.
A national meanwhile-use framework could provide model agreements, proportionate insurance options, clear guidance on utilities and rates, small activation grants and limited support for landlords who make premises safely available. Local authorities should be able to broker use without forcing every community to invent the process from the beginning.
5. Reciprocal partnership with Lush
Our relationship with Lush offers a useful example of a different kind of high-street partnership. The Poetry Pharmacy operates a small concession within Lush's Oxford Street flagship. In autumn 2026, the Poetry Pharmacy is also taking pop-ups into six Lush branches in different English and UK cities. In return, Lush is bringing a pop-up into the Poetry Pharmacy's lower-ground-floor Lab space in Bishop's Castle as part of Bishop's Castle Is Open.
This is a genuine exchange of spaces, audiences and confidence. A national retailer gives a small independent access to city-centre locations and established footfall. The independent business brings a distinctive cultural offer and its own audience into those stores. The larger retailer then travels in the opposite direction, participating in a small rural town and supporting a locally led activation.
The value is not simply commercial. The exchange connects high streets of radically different scales and challenges the assumption that support only flows from the centre to the margins. It allows the relationship to be reciprocal and dignified. Government and business organisations could encourage more partnerships of this kind through brokerage, recognition and modest support for transport, staffing and temporary fit-out.
6. Community pride and belonging
The condition of a high street affects how people feel about where they live. Empty windows and neglected buildings can create embarrassment and resignation. Conversely, visible activity signals that a place is cared for and that its future is not being decided entirely elsewhere.
Pride is not produced by cosmetic uniformity. In my experience, it comes from recognition: people seeing local character, effort and imagination reflected in the centre of their town. Independent shops and cultural spaces create opportunities for repeated encounters, conversation and participation. They function as informal third spaces, especially in places where other public facilities are limited.
Public realm improvements can support this when they make streets safer, more accessible and more pleasant to spend time in. However, overly prescriptive design codes can flatten local character, poorly placed street furniture can obstruct movement, and pedestrianisation can disadvantage people with limited mobility if parking, drop-off and access are not carefully planned. The test should be whether an intervention helps more people use and inhabit the street, not whether it produces a uniform visual scheme.
7. Business rates and fixed costs
Business-rates relief can be decisive for very small premises, and some small businesses in towns such as Bishop's Castle may pay little or no business rates. This should not lead to the conclusion that the cost problem has been solved. Rent or mortgage payments, energy, insurance, staffing, maintenance and stock remain substantial, while sales can be seasonal and unpredictable.
For larger premises or businesses that cross relief thresholds, changes to rates can arrive as a significant fixed cost that cannot be matched by an equivalent increase in sales. Transitional arrangements and relief should be predictable over several years. Sudden cliffs discourage businesses from taking larger premises, improving them or growing beyond the smallest scale.
Rates policy should also support temporary occupation. A landlord or community group should not face a confusing or disproportionate liability merely because a dark shop is opened for a short cultural or retail use.
8. Funding and local powers
Funding reaches the places most able to write these often complicated bids, and to assemble partnerships and satisfy complex criteria, which is not always the same as reaching the places with the greatest need or the strongest ideas. Rural disadvantage can be dispersed and less statistically visible than deprivation concentrated within an urban ward. Allocation methods should therefore consider isolation, loss of services, transport connectivity, ageing populations, vacancy and limited local administrative capacity.
Existing powers such as High Street Rental Auctions, Compulsory Purchase Orders and community purchase rights may be useful in particular cases, but they are comparatively heavy tools. Many local problems concern neither an entirely absent owner nor a community ready to buy a building. They concern an owner who might agree to use, a group with an idea and a gap in practical capacity, finance or confidence. Light-touch brokerage and meanwhile-use support may achieve more quickly than a coercive process.
Where stronger powers are used, they might also be accompanied by funding and professional capacity. A legal power on paper does not enable a small council or community organisation to value a property, negotiate, insure it, repair it and operate it.
Conclusion
Smaller high streets should not be treated as failed versions of larger retail centres. Their future may lie in becoming distinctive destinations built around culture, landscape, hospitality, conversation, creativity and human scale.
Government can help by making buildings easier to inhabit and finance, vacant spaces easier to test, partnerships easier to form and local coordination possible to fund. Public realm work has a role, but the deepest improvement comes when people have reasons to enter buildings, meet one another and feel that their town expresses a living identity.
Sometimes regeneration begins with an ambitious capital scheme. Sometimes it begins more simply: a light above a shop, an artist in an empty window, a small retailer welcomed into a larger store, or a national business willing to make the return journey to a rural town.
August 2026
https://committees.parliament.uk/work/9923/revitalising-high-streets/publications/written-evidence/
