‘Britain's town and city centres are in a state of crisis’ (p. 1). So Alastair Kefford tells us in the introduction to The Life and Death of the Shopping City. But if the death of the high street has been discussed in the press for the past 20 years, the cause of the problem cannot be attributed to recent political, economic and cultural shifts alone. Instead, as Kefford meticulously shows, the roots of the crisis go as far back as the 1940s, at the very birth of the post-war shopping centre. And it is here that the author stakes his claim, in a comprehensive investigation into the urban and economic policies, and, crucially, the public–private partnerships that rebuilt the British town centre.
The Life and Death of the Shopping City is loosely chronological in structure, charting the transformation of the urban centre over time. In chapters 1 and 2, we see how the urban environment was remodelled around rationalized shopping districts in the towns and cities blighted by the blitz. From the outset, large chains and retailers held sway over the Ministry of Planning, arguing for the speedy reconstruction of shopping centres before civic schemes; how better to return to business as usual? But it would be wrong to assume that local businesses would benefit from the prioritization of retail in the immediate post-war reconstruction. High rents and deals struck between large retailers and local authorities to construct new shopping facilities meant that local businesses were effectively ‘expelled’ from redeveloped shopping centres. This, Kefford observes, ‘was a pattern which would recur repeatedly across the subsequent decades’ (p. 63).
As redevelopment through retailing began to spread across Britain, it was no longer only the large retailers who had a say in how the urban centre could be reshaped. By the late 1950s and 1960s, local authorities began to partner with commercial developers on wholesale redevelopment schemes in the form of shopping precincts and, later, covered centres. As chapter 3 shows, this would see the sway of large retailers usurped by private developers, like Arndale, who promised to bring the glamour of the American mall to towns and cities across Britain. In turn, the shopping centres of the 1960s and 1970s paved the way for new practices of consumption. As Kefford writes, ‘These carefully curated landscapes of consumption amounted to a fundamental restructuring of not just the built environment but of urban public space, culture and experience’ (p. 5). But, in chapter 5, the author navigates these new ‘Landscapes of leisure’ on the ground, where tensions between civic versus consumer space come to the surface.
Despite the perceived emergence of a mass-affluent society, did these new shopping environments reflect the genuine demands of the British public? Kefford argues not in chapter 6, titled ‘Demand and discontent in the shopping city’. If the post-war shopping city had been born out of rational planning systems in the 1940s, planning models were very much still on the agenda two decades on. Yet, as Kefford shows, sometimes projections for future retail demand were simply glossed over by local authorities when they did not produce the desired results (p. 251). With growing resentment for large shopping centres in towns and cities across Britain, the development of such complexes seems to be at odds with the consumers these spaces sought to serve.
The Life and Death of the Shopping City tracks the parties (political and otherwise) who, over the course of 80 years, sought to benefit from the new shopping centres. Chapter 4, which navigates the public–private partnerships between local authorities and commercial developers, is particularly telling. Corruption scandals were the extreme by-product of 1960s redevelopment. But it was commonplace for big developers, like Capital & Counties, to enjoy close – or direct – relations with the Conservatives; the company's director was the MP for Croydon and served for a time in the 1960s at the Ministry of Works (p. 167). In chapter 7, Kefford notes that a controlling stake in Capital & Counties was acquired by an investment company in 1985 who proceeded to substantially grow the company's ‘portfolio of shopping centres’ well into the twenty-first century. Kefford pinpoints this as the ‘transformation of the urban retail landscape into a lucrative tradable commodity’ – confirmation, once and for all, that shopping centres were never really about shopping (p. 291).
Using a number of shopping centre developments across Britain as a basis, and with an acute understanding of the multifaceted development of public planning over the latter half of the twentieth century, The Life and Death of the Shopping Centre achieves what it sets out to, to show the ‘planning system as it actually existed in Britain’ (p. 17). In this sense, Kefford's book is a valuable contribution to recent work in urban history that seeks to reassess the post-war period. Behind the projections and promises of an affluent society lies a series of deals and power shifts in the private and public sector that would shape the shopping city.
