One thing that I think ruins more deprived towns is how ugly high streets are. Vape shops, kebab shops and betting shops have so much ‘visual noise’ to attract our attention. I’m sure you know the offensive colouring and over-illumination I’m talking about.
Even with normal supermarkets, I appreciate when they make an effort to neatly blend in (pictured in the post).
I’m not saying everything has to look uniform, and richer towns generally don’t have this problem as much, but it really makes poorer ones look so much worse.
41 comments
I think it’s a great idea to do everything we can to make developing places more expensive, this will definitely help. Personally I think planning laws are just too easy and we’re building too many things, we need to stop this.
If you ever go to a place where they don’t allow the lit up plastic signage, they always look so much nicer.
While I’d happily lose all the vape shops, betting shops etc.. I don’t think forcing the shops to fit in to their surroundings is a good idea.
High streets are supposed to draw people to them. Places of life and noise and colour, not a place where everything looks uniform and standard. It would kill them even more.
Islington council didn’t let me convert the ground floor of my house into a shop front though I was going to keep all the brick work and only install a door. So imagine a regular house front just with 2 doors instead of one, and a small sign that I highlighted in my submission would be magnetic and taken down when the shop is closed. They told me no because it will ruin the streets appearance.
There’s a Co-op opposite my house that’s like 40m in length and fully glass and blasts bright white LED light onto the street 24/7. And there’s a kebab shop literally 5 homes to my left.
So if they do want uniformity they best tell these big corporations to match the same restrictions we have to obey.
ban betting shops altogether but not for what they look like. Aesthetics are subjective and a silly thing to legislate
I noticed how ugly them vape shops are with multi colours
. Barber shops too with black and gold with the lights , tacky.
I am ok with rules on advertising/styling
There is definitely a conversation to have around visual noise but I’d argue the biggest offender is often the council itself with the abundance of signs and markings, not to mention how many of their own buildings don’t exactly look great
High streets with coherent design language always look better imo
Yes, I’m a fan of the aesthetic building laws some European countries have. But I’d also want to include quality of work; poor brickwork, messy rendering or leftover mess should be inspected by someone and tidied up. Should be treated the same way as littering (though likely more enforceable)
God, yes lol. And some cleaniness standards for good measure. How did we get to this sloppy mess we have now is baffling.
Yes definitely!
I hate those stores that have floor to ceiling windows covered in decals of pictures of booze and food. Looks horrible!!
“Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.” – Alain de Botton
Yes, definitely this should be regulated. The bad taste of some shop owners is appalling, and they spoil many high streets with their ugliness.
Given how many towns have issues with vacant shopfronts on their highstreets I’m not sure raising the barriers to entry will help.
Its probably a good idea for larger cities where there’s more demand for shop space than available but I think a lot of towns are just happy to have businesses on the high street instead of the place looking derelict
No, my local high street is already on its arse and not looking like it’s anywhere near recovering. Adding another layer on top to make things more difficult or awkward is not needed.
My high street doesn’t look like shite because of the styling, it looks shite because more than half the shops are empty and it’s getting worse.
Yes. Where I live is busy introducing one to combat all the Vape / American Candy / Hookah / Dubai Chocolate stores popping up everywhere. I think the turning point was when one opened in an old tea room, and instantly covered every mm² of glass in white vinyl wrap with hindereds of pooly photoshopped products.
Of course the same people complaining about the town centre dying are now complaining this is a waste of money and 100% of all tax should go to fixing roads.
Look at photos from Edinburgh Princes St 20 years ago and today. It’s a joke.
Personally, I’d rather ten independent shops with garish lights than ten neatly blended in corporations like Tesco. It’s the lack of originality and community that I hate.
As that would be up to some authority persons interpretation, I feel like it would lead to some bizarre rulings against small business owners whilst national companies have the resources to find any loophole to get around the problem/bung a brown envelope at the right people.
And even if you have rules on signage, what about shop windows? Betting shops tend to have their windows filled with huge posters, would those be allowed? Where exactly do you draw the line.
Just having shops on the High Street is a struggle
Cambridge train station banned certain shop fronts there’s a neros greggs and sainsburys with different frontage
I’m all for the gaudy flashing LED lights that the – lets just say – less trustworthy establishments use. It’s a great visual clue to avoid these places like the plague.
Seriously though, yes, we should have regulations about this awful crap.
I think there should be a rule (if there’s not already) that shop fronts have to be kept clean, well-maintained, and free of excessive clutter. I look at some of my local shops and they look like a bomb site. They could be selling the best products in the world but, if it looks like nobody has cleaned the windows for 30 years and their displays spill halfway across the pavement, I’m not shopping there for love nor money.
“I appreciate when [brands] make an effort to fit in”
**They only do, when they’re forced to**. This comes down to individual parish bylaws or restrictions imposed by property listing status.
High streets brands aren’t doing out of the kindness of their hearts to fit in visually.
Visual noise can be overwhelming but I’d rather we focused first on empty shops, litter, dog shit, broken paving stones, buildings in desperate need of maintenance, safer pedestrian routes, more accessible streets and facilities for disabled people and the elderly and folk with pushchairs, reducing anti-social behaviour and petty crime, etc.
I used to work in signage. I will tell you now, if you see a supermarket with signage like that, it’s 99% because the local planning authority has enforced it. Or, very occasionally, the landlord of the building they’re leasing.
High street businesses like supermarkets, shops and banks invariably have a branding bible with different tiers of branding depending on the area and local planning restrictions. Their first option is always maximum levels of illumination and the largest signs / lettering they can fit onto the building within their brand design. They will almost always go for that option first if they think there’s a realistic chance of getting planning approval.
The building in your photo is almost certainly in either a conservation area, overlooking some kind of heritage asset (listed building, etc.) or is located in a planning zone where the local authority has set extremely rigid principles on what advertising can look like. Or again, has a very strict landlord.
The flipside of this is that if you have a local high street full of brightly illuminated, gaudy signage where anything goes, it’s because the local council have an “anything goes” planning policy. And the reason this is so common in deprived towns is because councils are desperate not to deter investment by businesses.
Theres not enough high street shops left for it to make a difference
we definitely should, so many high streets look ugly and run down because if the horrible store fronts and these metal boards with terrible lettering and random colors.
Yes, I can’t see an argument against it really. It looks SO much nicer.
Bath city centre does this really well. Stores commonly have the text of their logo, but no coloured background to be in keeping with the look of the area. Obviously there you’ve got the whole world heritage site thing going, so it’s not really a good look for people to just be slapping up neon orange signs all over the place, but it really makes a nice difference.
too much regulation, shops trying to stand out is fine
Incidentally, I’ve just realised you meant this building as an example of something that looks aesthetically pleasing. I think it’s fugly as hell. Signs and bright lights wouldn’t make much difference to me in this instance.
No. That would be boring.
Also, I often don’t remember the names of shops, only their logos or colours.
What ruins high streets are a lack of shops.
Putting rules for shops making it less attractive to set up physical locations would do more harm than good in many areas.
Yes and places like Stratford Upon Avon do have this for example not letting McDonalds having their big glowing signs
too much regulation so no
100% agree. Areas I have visited that do have guidance and rules which is either enforced or aggressively encouraged always look like nicer, smarter areas. Our high streets now are horrific. Wooden boards and plastic coverings over the windows look hideous. If you look at a lot of the buildings, they are old and lovely once you look up. It could look so much better than it is.
In an ideal world where our high streets aren’t dying out due to online retailers AND out of town retail parks, I’d be all for it. Whenever I go to Leamington Spa down the pavilion, I appreciate how all of the shops blend in the classic Georgian architecture.
I agree in that I dislike garish, brash signage on store fronts. There’s a shop near where I live that has moving, extremely bright flashing signage that gives me a headache looking at it (and I don’t have any sort of photosensitive epilepsy so imagine how bad it must be for those people walking nearby). For me personally, I’m turned off going into local businesses with ugly signage because it likely speaks to the quality of their products and shows the owners don’t care for the nearby environment….
BUT it’s not just business owners that appear to not care about the local environment but its councils, local authorities and the general public too. I’m currently studying sustainable city design at the moment and my lecturer attributes a lot of city disfunction down to the fact that we’ve built modern city developments just for the purposes of retail and not to make these places enjoyable beyond just spending money at stores for big corporations. Our town and city centres are dying because they’re often not accessible. In London and Greater Manchester, you can get cheap, reliable public transport to the centre of a large town in the city for £1-£3 per single. In other parts of the country, privatised buses are more expensive, run less frequently and stop away from the town centre, meaning cars need to be used to avoid “undesirable” 10 mins+ walks.
In order to accommodate for cars, you need large indoor and outdoor car parks and on street parking as well as roads which eat up usable space for your town centre. For large retail units, you also need space as close to the shops as possible for lorries and vans to park to drop off deliveries of goods.
Going back to my point about walks being “undesirable”, I think we have such an automated way of life that we want to live our lives as conveniently as possible. Jimmy The Giant put it really well but basically, he argued that we’ve come to focus our lives around getting as many goods as quickly as possible. If we need meat for a recipe, we go to a large supermarket, using the self service checkout, or even get a quick delivery for it instead of spending 1 hour going to a local butcher on the high street, chatting to them, saying hello to a guide dog out fundraising, walking outside to listen to a busker play their acoustic music, getting caught in the rain and waiting inside of a local coffee shop, buying a hot drink and sweet treat and walking back home. Our lives are much more automated thanks to cars and the internet mean we prioritise the speed of getting cheap stuff rather than enjoying getting stuff because we’re living busier lives and are put under more pressure to buy buy buy from capitalist overlords. The general public are more concerned about getting things as quickly as possible rather than enjoying the experience of getting things slower.
If the general public want cheap, quick things, then of course the local councils are not going to prioritise local aesthetics in planning- unless the town centre is a local attraction for its beauty (like my example with Leamington Spa). Nice spaces with nice, more discreet signage slow people down in the quest to get cheap quick stuff.
If we don’t want garish signage in our town centres, we need (to the best of our ability):
* Support local businesses like greengrocers and cafes.
* Spend time in town centres, not retail parks. Show your councils that you do care about these spaces and you don’t want them to rot.
* Support taxes on companies like Amazon and if possible, boycott them. If cheap goods aren’t as cheap anymore on Amazon.com as a tax would be put on consumer’s price tags, they’d be forced to shop around and they’d potentially want to look towards buying from local businesses in need of local customers.
* Petition your council to stop more takeaways/betting shops/ vape shops occupying units. If shops have to close, allow the community to use a few of the spaces. Coventry city centre is seeing so many shop units close: instead of focusing regeneration on just shopping, attract people to town centres in other ways. Wellbeing hubs, clinics, baby play centres, socialising spaces orientated towards older people, 3rd spaces for teenagers that have few physical spaces now to grow from childhood to adulthood, cafes for remote workers, venues for hire for charity events etc could all be better uses of the space than yet another betting shop or a vape shop with ugly signage. In order for these places to be successful long term, we also need to adjust our behaviour. We have to be able to go without our phones for a few hours and enjoy socialising in these venues otherwise they don’t build a sense of community and the council is tempted to sell the unit on to the 200th takeaway in a mile radius.
The problem areas are already problem areas, while this would undoubtedly make certain high streets look a lot better. The cost to small businesses to redecorate would be unfair to force on them. They originally came about as after the war the old sash window shop fronts were falling apart and too expensive to repair, it was a necessary evil to stop our high streets from looking run down, they had to make them cheap.
There are 2 boots near me with a brown sign instead of a blue one and they look so much better so yes