Pundits

At breakfast today, BH told me all about some pundit, probably on some far flung free-view channel, banging on about the dire state of some of our parades and high streets. It seems that Seven Sisters Road was bottom of the heap, while the not so far away Crouch End was top of the heap.

When are we going to stop deluding ourselves about these parades and high streets, mostly built for the needs of a quite different time? When, for example, married women were mostly housewives and did their shopping daily, locally. Visiting the butcher, the baker, the fishmonger, the greengrocer, the dry goods store and the candlestick maker. With the result that we are now left with far more commercial property on these parades and high streets than we need - and we need to let them shrink back to a more appropriate size for today, letting the outskirts drop back into the residential use much of it started out with.

In the meantime there seems to be a conspiracy, not to say delusion, of greed whereby councils conjure up the golden goose of fat business rates and developers conjure up the golden goose of fat commercial rents. Perhaps we could wean our councils off this nonsense, if we were to give them some proper fund raising powers, as they have in most other parts of the world, and reduce their dependence on the bounty of central government.

I associate to the lady from fashion retail, the darling of the media and chattering classes a few years ago, who would swan around the country waving her magic wand over swathes of moribund retail. A lady whose name I could not recall and Bing did not help with - but Google delivered the goods: Mary Portas. According to Wikipedia, a lady with lots of artistic pretensions, who started life as an Irish Catholic. See reference 1.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Portas.