Peter Viney's Blog

The Decline of Bournemouth

Circling The Square: Bournemouth in the 1960s. The print that adorns my office wall.

I was born in Bournemouth. I went to school in Bournemouth. Now I live in Poole. It’s way nicer. Poole is now part of BCP (Bournemouth – Christchurch – Poole) the daft new name for the conurbation. Now we are also BCP ratepayers. They thought BCP would sound cool like NYC or LA or NOLA.

The question is – Bournemouth is in severe decline. Do Poole and Christchurch inhabitants want to revive it?

The last couple of times I’ve been in Bournemouth (apart from driving straight to the BH2 Odeon and parking, or to the BIC) I’ve resolved not to bother again. It has become run down incredibly quickly.

So …

The local paper (the Evening Echo) is full of Bournemouth’s travails. There are fifty empty retail units in the centre as of February 2020. Empty shops, boarded up cinemas, homeless in doorways, filth and litter, the huge Marks & Spencer is closed, and now Beales, the premier department store, looks like it’s going out of business.

Added: Evening Echo photo 15 February

Beales was rebuilt in the 1950s after being bombed in World War Two in 1943. It’s family history for me. My mum left South Wales in 1930, aged 15 to skivvy in Bournemouth hotels and send her meagre wages back to Tredegar. Her dream was to work in fashion in Beales, and she achieved that in the mid 1930s. After my dad died in 1966, she went back there and worked again in Ladies Fashions.

Irony … “Bournemouth a great place to shop” on the boarded up and closed Marks & Spencer store. NOT.

Reasons are cited for the decline, high rates, extortionate parking prices, pay machines that won’t take real money, tired old department stores, the large Castle Point shopping centre on the edge of town.

They say the High Street is in dire straits everywhere. We were in Newbury the other day. Disaster area. Hull had a lot of closures, indicating that the European Culture City had limited impact, and then mainly in the old town.

However, the high street decline is not universal. Bath, Exeter, Norwich, York, Chichester, Winchester, Stratford Upon Avon are all thriving. All of them have a tourism boost, though  less in Exeter, Winchester and Norwich than the other four. Bournemouth has a major tourism boost too, but perhaps the tourists head for the golden sands rather than the town centre.

Let’s go back to 1966. World Cup Year.  I was not only born in Bournemouth, but my dad was too – few of my generation go back that far. The World Cup venues were rated on shopping attractions. London, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Sunderland and Middlesborough. The newspaper article suggested that these places were mainly very poor for shopping, and listed the Six Best Towns for shopping in the UK. Three were not World Cup venues … Newcastle, Bournemouth and Bristol. In my memory Bournemouth was ranked “Fourth best shopping centre in the UK.”

Department Store heaven: 10″ 78 rpm record from Bobby & Co (now Debenhams). 1937.

Was that ever true? I suspect not. The article was oriented to fashion shopping (though not I fear “youth fashion”), and in those days Bournemouth was “Department Store Central” … Beales, Bealesons (closed in 1982), Brights ( later Dingles, then House of Fraser since 2007), Bobbys (Debenhams now), Plummers (closed 1973), Bon Marche (closed decades ago, J.J. Allan (decades ago) and Maples (decades ago).  J.J. Allen and Bealesons were converted into little semi-malls.

Plummer Rodis department store in the 1960s (all the building behind Dolcis)

In those days, department stores were still relevant. I know my sister and friends would make trips to Southampton which they considered better and cheaper. My third date with Karen was on a Saturday … going to Southampton because she said it was better for shopping. I also had doubts when I lived in Hull in 1966-1969. It also had huge department stores, and a brilliant food market with a far wider range than Bournemouth. I would score Hull as better at that time in everything EXCEPT fashion. Bournemouth also had the small boutiques. I thought Norwich (1969-1970) vastly better than Bournemouth, but I was probably counting book and record stores.

The only successful department store group nowadays seems to be John Lewis, and they have got rid of old stores in favour of new purpose built ones – see Kingston-on-Thames or Southampton where they moved from the High Street to West Quay. John Lewis Home (in Branksome) recognizes that the clothes business is best left to specialist stores nowadays and focuses on furniture, white goods, TV, computer, kitchen stuff and lighting. I can’t see them bothering with outdated existing buildings.

Department Stores, because they sell a wide range, inevitably leach off trade from potential specialist independent shops. The cookware shop failed in Gervis Place … but then there are three department stores selling cookware. Having said that, the department stores have all narrowed down to focus on clothes and cosmetics with a bit of linen and furniture. They all do luggage and bed linen at huge discounts during their frequent sales. i.e. half price is the normal price for suitcases and duvet covers. Does anyone buy them outside the sales?

I think back to Beales having a decent bookshop and a decent music department and large toy department. That was a long time ago. The clothes in the department stores tend to be concessions … stores within stores. There is no longer any sense of a specialist fashion buyer, and curated stock for the particular store in any of them. With House of Fraser that issue goes right up to Harrods in London. The concessions are failed high-street brands. Burtons as a store within a store? That was where we bought our cheap grey terylene school suits when it was a shop. It’s not a name to conjure with.

Bournemouth has gone a long way down since 1970.

My theory is that the rot started at least fifty years and it was a mix of inept local government officials, especially planners, coupled with a ‘dubious’ and partisan local council. Think back, in two of the safest Conservative parliamentary seats in the country, the Liberal Democrats have won control of local government: “no overall control” through the 1990s, Liberal Democrat 2003-2007. That’s how bad some of those Conservative councils were.  The voters got fed up of councillors building monuments to themselves in social housing names and roads.

NO BIG DECISIONS

No big decisions were made about the town centre in Bournemouth when other councils were making major changes. When I lived in Norwich in 1969, it already had a partly pedestrianized centre. Then take Cheltenham. They created a mall from the back of major shops by roofing over the road behind and creating new shops on the other side. More recently the huge South Gate development in Bath with three floors of car parking below was a major boost to the entire city. Bournemouth did nothing.

In 1981, as free-lance authors, we had an office right in the centre of Bournemouth, in Post Office Road. We loved our BH1 1AA post code. Our tiny triangular first floor office suffered from the cooking smells emanating from the sandwich shop below, and the constant noise of the parrot from the dressmakers above, whose business of taking up hems and trouser legs necessitated a constant parade of shop assistants trudging noisily up the uncarpeted stairs.

Old Christchurch Road had just been pedestrianised (ten years too late). Trees were planted, only to be destroyed, every single one broken off at the base when Bournemouth played Leeds United in the FA Cup. Bastards. Then Woolworths had closed … they moved down to Woolco in what is now Castle Point. Boots shifted from Old Christchurch Road to Woolworths old store on The Square, and McDonalds opened in Boots old store. We were annoyed because we then had to walk 150 yards to W,H. Smith to buy our stationery instead of Boots (which then sold stationery, LPs and cassettes), and most of the way we were wading through McDonald’s litter.

The bus station, in Exeter Road in the late 1960s

There was a major gap in the town centre after the Bus Station (now the site of BH2 Odeon) burned down in 1976. The balance was never restored in the shape of the place, and buses moved up to the Triangle … interestingly favouring the Commercial Road side of town  (roughly West) over the Old Christchurch Road side (roughly East).

The Square still had buses circling, effectively cutting the centre in two, which was Bournemouth’s perennial problem. At that point a plan was mooted. The idea was for a huge development replacing the entire Square. It would be partly underground with the Bourne stream running through the middle of a mall and gardens on top. It would create a covered mall linking the two sides with new shops on both sides. Shops like Debenhams and Boots could link into it. Rumour is rumour, but the story circulating among town centre business – and in a small way we were one of them then – was that the Beales family, which had members as councillors, had destroyed the plan.  This was around 1982, and they had just closed the large Bealesons store in Commercial Road in June of that year, retreating to the main store in Old Christchurch Road. It’s ironical. Maybe they realized with the new proposed plan, their main store, Beales, would be on the far edge of the re-developed town centre, and that the new mall would be a conduit taking shoppers over to the other side … Commercial Road, which they had just left.

Maples, 2020 Still empty after all these years. Conversions of large old stores don’t work.

The result of being on the extreme edge of a shopping centre is illustrated by Maples in St. Peter’s Road. It was a premium major furniture store with a long curving frontage, built in 1937. It must be listed as an important piece of architecture. In 1993 the interior was damaged by an IRA bomb.  It closed decades ago, but they never found a use for it. A few times shops tried to function on bits of the ground floor, but it’s mainly been blank windows for many years. It still is.

This was an era where other towns were building malls, redeveloping the centre. Bournemouth just didn’t. It’s never recovered.

What was supposed to be the super mall, Dalkeith Arcade, is now called Richmond Gardens, opening onto Old Christchurch Road. Fine if you like Wilko and LIDL. It’s got the car park, and was originally a huge two floor supermarket, I think it was Safeway. It didn’t work for a number of reasons. People just didn’t shop for food in the town centre (they don’t live there). In recent years, I know of two people who got mugged getting down from the car park.

At one-point Virgin proposed a megastore and cinemas on the old bus station site. That didn’t happen either … it would drag the focus onto the Square and away from Beales and House of Fraser. Of course, that’s exactly what the BH2 Odeon has done.

ALTERNATIVE CENTRES

Bournemouth is a little like London in having several shopping areas rather than a major focus on the centre. This may go back to its development as a seaside resort with train stations at Christchurch, Pokesdown (“For Southbourne On Sea”), Boscombe, Bournemouth Central, Bournemouth West, Branksome … all feeding different beach and hotel / guest house areas. Both Westbourne and Fisherman’s Walk are improving shopping and restaurant areas. Boscombe is … well, Boscombe, and has been run down for decades. Winton is extremely busy, student dominated increasingly. The diversity of strong(ish) shopping centres takes away from the town centre. Kinson still has a number of shops. Other minor areas, like Columbia Road and Southbourne Crossroads have given up.

Christchurch is close, and apparently thriving. Small market towns with specialist shops are doing better generally.

Poole has problems, especially the awful bus station. I saw that Yellow Buses are pulling out of the bus station because of anti-social behaviour.  As with central Bournemouth, Dorset Police seem singularly lacking at dealing with that issue. But Poole has the Dolphin centre mall which is busy, a Sainsburys with large car park, and the far end of the High Street near the museum is a gem with specialist shops and restaurants. The bit of the High Street in between is its problem. Friends who come from Bournemouth, but live elsewhere, are astonished to find “Poole is much nicer than Bournemouth nowadays.” It is. When we were kids it was rough.

ONE RIGHT DECISION

Wessex Way: right through the middle

 Bournemouth’s bold step was The Wessex Way cutting a swathe right through the middle. It took years to complete. It started in 1965-66, but the roundabout at Asda was mid 70s, as was the Richmond Hill underpass. It meant and still means that Central Bournemouth is easy to access. We argued about it back then; bits of Horseshoe Common were lost, St Paul’s Church was demolished (my grandad was verger), St Paul’s school was demolished. All the streets between Holdenhurst Road and Charminster Road were sliced in two (my dad was born in Capstone Road). We protested the loss of a clump of pines at the top of Richmond Hill when the underpass was created later. In the end, it was a very good move.

Brighton argued for decades and failed to do similar which made it a nightmare for traffic. When I worked at the Russell Cotes Museum in 1966, a bus from The Square up Old Christchurch Road to the Lansdowne in the evening rush hour took 25 to 30 minutes! I had the choice of walking up Bath Road to the Lansdowne to get my bus to Ensbury Park, or walking back down to The Square. The trouble was the buses never stopped at The Lansdowne because they were already full to bursting.

Recently there’s been press about Bournemouth being one of the four worst towns for traffic. Nonsense. Try leaving Oxford at 5 pm as I did for years. I regularly spent half an hour to cover a mile between the centre and the Ring Road. Brighton anytime. Try getting into Bristol in the morning, or out in the evening, especially from the south-west. We used to film our ELT videos in Bristol … good professional facilities and studio, buildings of any era you want. We stopped working there because moving a film crew and vehicles around Bristol even at midday took far too long.  Parking was ridiculous. Side streets in Clifton are barely negotiable because of parked cars. Some TV companies then chose Bournemouth for ease of getting around.

Exeter is a nightmare because the one way system is so convoluted. Mostly, Bournemouth is remarkably good because of The Wessex Way. I also regularly drive Poole to Hengistbury Head in busy periods and take the coast road. It’s really easy. Bournemouth DOES have horrible traffic jams, but they are not cross town jams. The nightmare is getting from Wimborne to Bournemouth or Poole in the morning rush hour. I did it the other day … 70 minutes.

CASTLE POINT

That was originally The Hampshire Centre which opened in 1968, when Bournemouth was still in Hampshire. It centred around the then huge Woolco store. We bought our first TV there in 1972. It was demolished in 2001 and became Castle Point, with a flagship Marks and Spencer, and importantly a large Sainsburys, Asda and B&Q.

The definition of a UK High Street is said to be where you find W.H. Smith, Boots and Marks & Spencer. It has all three, and a large Superdrug. Bournemouth town centre fails on lack of Marks & Spencer.

Castle Point has a free car park. It’s easy to get to. Wessex Way gets you most of the way. It’s very hard for Bournemouth to compete because why pay £4 to park when you get the same stores or better versions with free parking?

FOOD STORES

Marks & Spencer closed. Back in the early 1970s, there was a Safeway and Habitat opposite, and a car park. I spoke to an M&S manager elsewhere who said he used to work in the Bournemouth store. He said they tried for years to get a parking refund deal with the Avenue Road car park opposite, but they wouldn’t co-operate (and the fixed normal prices were too high to make a refund feasible). So, he said, the Bournemouth store had the large food department but couldn’t sell food in quantity. The main sales were sandwiches (which they continue within W.H. Smith). So that whole area of their business didn’t work. Safeway failed in the Dalkeith Arcade site. LIDL is of limited appeal. OK, there’s a reasonable Tesco Express in Bourne Avenue to satisfy town centre workers, but you wouldn’t do a major shop there because you can’t park.

Compare Bath with a large Waitrose with parking in the centre, or Salisbury with a large Sainsburys on the main car park (and a large Waitrose just across the ring road).

You can’t combine shopping in Bournemouth with major grocery shopping. You can combine them at Castle Point, and in most towns.

Bournemouth must be the largest town without a decent delicatessen. In the late 60s it had the incomparable Williamson & Treadgold in the arcade, plus later Brights (Dingles / House of Fraser) had a first rate Food Hall, as many department stores did in those days. Most of the market towns have greengrocers, fishmongers, butchers, health food shops, confectioners, bakeries. Tiny Swanage has a poultry and game butcher, a different beef butcher, a cheese shop. Not Bournemouth.

ENTERTAINMENT

Bournemouth Council failed to save The Palace Court Theatre. It got turned into a church without planning permission, and they just sat the council out until ten years passed and they no longer needed permission.

WRONG: The Palace Court Theatre in 2020: Harold Pinter was in rep here and stage manager. It used to have an entrance on Westover Road.

Next they replaced the Winter Gardens, which had such a good acoustic that the BBC kept a studio below the stage for recording the BSO (Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra). The BSO departed to a new home at Poole Arts Centre (now Poole Lighthouse). The replacement BIC (Bournemouth International Centre) had a 50% greater capacity than the Winter Gardens, and when Victoria Wood played there she looked at the decor, grimaced at the awful acoustics and announced it was the “first time I’ve played in a Tesco Loading Bay.” The acoustics have been greatly improved recently. However it’s designed for political party and trades union conferences. I know educational conferences have looked, and declined to book it because it has insufficient “break-out” rooms.

The Winter Gardens ran great summer shows (I did limelights as a student), but the BIC was just too big for that.

Then they closed the Pier Theatre, which was the right size but a very cold and draughty walk in Winter … and a long walk from the car parks on a wet day.

There is no viable town centre theatre. The Pavilion is just too big … it’s fine for musicals and pantomimes and visiting music shows (and should be retained for them) but doesn’t work for the sort of 400-700 capacity theatre most touring productions are designed for. The Palace Court needs replacing. In 2018, Bournemouth Council announced plans for “Pavilion Gardens” with a theatre and art gallery. Let’s see.

RIGHT: The Tivoli Theatre, Wimborne. Ten miles away and exactly the kind of thing Bournemouth needs

The greater conurbation is well served by two highly successful community theatres, the Tivoli Theatre in Wimborne and the Regent Centre in Christchurch. I believe there’s room for one in Bournemouth too … the Grand Cinema (Bingo Hall) is closed up in Westbourne. But given the Tivoli and Regent as converted cinemas, I would say Bournemouth needs the sort of small modern arts centre that you find in towns like Yeovil and Basingstoke. Yes, we have Poole Lighthouse, but the area is populous enough to support another.

Westover Road 2020. Mainly shops TO LET. Doorways TOILET.

Westover Road? Once one of the premium shopping streets in Britain. Now it’s the worst example of empty shops and rough sleepers in doorways. In the late 60s it had two cinemas (then the ABC and Gaumont) plus the huge ice rink. They never managed to do anything with the ice rink site. Eventually Odeon owned both cinema. They were old and converted into multiple screens. They suffered from severe sound leakage between screens. So recently Odeon moved across the gardens to the other side into the large BH2 Odeon complex with restaurants. BH2 Odeon made far more sense than modernising, but that has left Westover Road with three huge boarded up places … two cinemas and an ice rink.

The Gaumont (Odeon) frontage, Westover Road 2020. You can see why it’s a listed building. It should have a blue plaque. In 1963 The Beatles played here twice nightly for a whole week.

What can they do with them? The Gaumont has a listed frontage. Trouble is, it’s way more expensive to convert an old building than it is to rebuild with modern safety, heating, access and so on. Also, conversion is subject to VAT. New build isn’t (at least for domestic buildings).

Hinton Road: rear of Gaumont (left) and the Ice Rink (right)

A radical move? Retain the front wall of the Gaumont (OK, Odeon) as in London developments.  You might even retain the back wall too … though on balance, nice as it is, it would be impractical. Demolish the rest of the building entirely. Build a brand new arts complex with theatre (perhaps 400 seats and modern … say like the Minerva in Chichester, semi in the round. Add a studio theatre with 150 seats, maybe a small arts cinema, a dance space?

Then I think that as in Winchester restaurants would be encouraged to open around it. A few good fashion stores survive … Alfa, Robert Old, Richmond Classics. It’s a basis to attract more.

The ABC in 2020 – frontage not worth keeping

You still have to sort out the ABC and Ice Rink. Again, demolition would be the answer.

You could put an indoor sport complex on the ice rink site, but again, new build not conversion.

BH2 Odeon – I suspect this has shifted the town centre forever

I like BH2 Odeon. It also signals a shift in what we define as the town centre. It happens. New development in Exeter Road with the Winter Gardens redevelopment would seal it.

My son went to university in Evanston, Illinois. We went several times … great town centre. Then we heard about “Main Street” a mile away, aka “the old Main Street”. Long abandoned as the shopping centre, and now with some interesting odd stores relying on dirt-cheap rentals. That might well happen to Westover Road unless action is taken soon.

HOMELESS, ROUGH SLEEPERS 

Westover Road, 14 December 2019. One of Britain’s premier shopping experiences …

 This is what gets readers most impassioned. It happens. Let’s not go into social shifts or central government politics. There are areas where rough sleepers concentrate. If you try filming in the streets, they flock to you … mainly “Give us a fiver or we’ll shout and scream while you’re filming.” When they filmed Minder in East London, they got over it by supplying a free soup kitchen, and banning anyone who disrupted filming for life. That’s not new. That’s 40 years ago. When we filmed in the streets in Bristol, the catering van always gave police officers coffee and food which meant we usually had police officers standing around fending off noisy vagabonds. In the USA, we “rented” an off-duty policeman. (Good morning. I’m your police officer for today. Would anyone like to see my gun?) We had a great one on Long Island. He stopped traffic while we filmed a scene. Someone tooted their horn and he threatened to arrest them (Can’t you see they’re filming here! … it wouldn’t work in the UK, but filming is a serious event in the USA and worthy of respect.)

We used to get major problems filming in Oxford, which had a lot of homeless people even 30 and 20 years ago. I was told it was a combination of places to sleep, generous tourists and “care in the community” … i.e. shoving mentally ill people out of hospitals onto the street, and Oxford had several mental hospitals in the area around it. Generally warmer Southern towns with plenty of places to sleep in the open attract more homeless people. There are more than there used to be ALTHOUGH in the 1960s there was a community of 20 to 50 rough sleepers / travellers / early hippies basically camped out “under the pier” in Bournemouth. I sold ice cream on the beach every weekend from age 15 to 18 and I know it.

In Bath, ten years ago the underground car park under the police station had an entire side devoted to rough sleepers … the police wisely thought it best to let them congregate in one place under a degree of supervision, and it was at least dry and sheltered.

It is shameful to us as a country. A couple of weeks ago on a Saturday, I noticed some were huddled in doorways blue with cold, looking awful. Yet a few looked remarkably well fed and warm as they set out their blankets and signs. Yes, some will be fake. We can divide homeless v beggars. It still doesn’t excuse ignoring it. Most are genuine. Some readers of the Echo suggest Draconian policing will solve it. Obviously the town centre is vastly under-policed. When I was sixteen I remember being stopped outside Bobbys (Debenhams) because a policeman overheard us saying “Fuck.” We were ticked off and threatened with a report to our school. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Certainly, I was very angry to see burly down and outs (what the 19^th century called “sturdy beggars”) aggressively panhandling for money in Bournemouth, and they focus on the young, especially girls, and the elderly, who are frightened into giving them money. That’s an offence. The police should deal with it, and they don’t. Hanging around next to cash machines is also intimidating.

But there should be a centralised solution, even if it’s only as far as Bath’s underground car park. Yes, I know, people will say it will only attract more of them.

HEN NIGHTS, STAG NIGHTS AND YOOF

Bournemouth on a Friday and Saturday night is full of drunken groups with balloons and group T-shirts going out for a drink, a bit of shouting and swearing and a good vomit. They can be intimidating. Some towns are Stag Night / Hen Night destinations. Bournemouth is a major one. Last year we saw a huge drunken stag night party wandering around peaceful and sedate Stratford-upon-Avon at 11 p.m. looking confused and perplexed their ‘GARY & TRACY”  balloons trailing behind them. Stratford is NOT a good stag night destination.

People cite the night club / bar area from Horseshoe Common to the Lansdowne as another minus factor for Bournemouth.  I’m not convinced it is. It is a limited and defined geographical area. Most large towns have a similar area. Having lads pissing in shop doorways and girls vomiting in the gutter in an area of a town is widespead. Exeter one Friday night was full of it and walking back to our hotel meant picking our way through puddles of urine and vomit.

Like Bournemouth, Norwich has one long street full of discos, clubs and bars. Not having been to Norwich for a few years, we made the mistake of staying at a hotel at the end of it, and walking through it at 11 pm after a concert. They had two Paramedic buses lined up in the street. Twenty police officers at least. Two burly security guards ID-ing people at Tesco Express … which sells alcohol. Like Bournemouth’s Old Christchurch Road,  it’s a specialist yobbing about area.

IS IT THE SEASIDE? COMPARISONS …

The number of homeless / beggars is connected to location. In the summer a beach area attracts.  A flow of tourists attracts … though Bath and Winchester both seem to police panhandling and hanging around by cash machines better than Bournemouth does. However, Hastings, Eastbourne and Weymouth are as bad or worse than Bournemouth.  Hastings was much worse years ago – it’s a prime example of what we don’t want to happen.  The South-East has a definite immigration angle to this. Otherwise, it might just be proximity to the sea.

Brighton is worse in some areas for begging and drunken yobs … it shares the Hen Party / Stag Night issue with Bournemouth. In contrast, it does have a decent covered mall, which Bournemouth doesn’t. It has the Lanes, a unique independent shopping area, and it has the Theatre Royal / Brighton Pavilion “cultural” area with restaurants.

The Lanes isn’t what it used to be. We were in Lewes, just up the road from Brighton and actually closer to the two universities than the town centre. Lewes has the antique shops and booksellers that used to grace The Lanes in Brighton. We spoke to a couple of shop owners. Both had started in The Lanes, but the combination of staggering rates, drunken carousing and beggars drove them out to Lewes.

We see the same pattern here where Christchurch, Wimborne and Ringwood all offer pleasant and varied shopping environments. Ringwood has improved dramatically. Small attractive towns seem to be resisting the downward spiral far better than large ones.

RATE AND RENTS

 The other culprit, according to many readers is high rent and rates.

Rent first. A friend had a toy store twenty years ago (not here). After ten years, the bank, which owned the building, reviewed her rent and quadrupled it. Result? Out of business. It’s now a Costa. Yes, if you employ kids and sell 5p worth of coffee and hot water for £2.95, you can afford the rental. There are town centres where you have a Costa, Nero, Coffee One and a Starbucks within 100 yards. Madness.

Beales 3 February 2020. Closing down sale?

Rates. Beales pay £440,000 a year and want to negotiate a drop. That sum will be based on square feet. If they get a reduction, why won’t House of Fraser and Debenhams deserve the same?  Both were also teetering on the brink of liquidation in recent years. Look up at House of Fraser’s tiled walls. Small forests of weeds are growing out between them.

So Beales need to make a profit on sales of £8,500 a week just in order to pay their rates. £1200 a day after heat, light, rent, staff  just to cover rates. They’ve got SIX very large floors. £200 a floor. If shops don’t pay business rates, then householders will have to pay more. Much more. If they can’t run such a large area of shop space well enough to generate the money, then they’re finished. Much of it is effectively sub-let anyway. Department Stores are intrinsically an outdated model. Bournemouth suffers most of all because it had more per capita than other towns for many years.

On the other hand, a solution would be to create a small independent shop area. Old Christchurch Road pedestrian section looks the place. It already has a fine record store, The Vault, and it needs more similar businesses. An independent bookshop? A delicatessen? Craft shops? A specialist food shop section? The example should be Frome. The steep cobbled Catherine Hill was run down. So they gave new businesses a “rates holiday” to get started. Now it’s thriving … artisan shops, antiques, fashion, vinyl, haberdashery and they are virtually all one-off shops. Owner run. That’s a model to emulate (and Westover Road might need it to prompt revival).

I just drove through Ashley Road in Upper Parkstone, hardly a major shopping district but it has butchers, specialist tea merchant, Polish delis, a South African deli, an excellent Asian greengrocer, a bookshop, a collectors’ record shop, bakeries, children’s clothes specialist, party shop, a Waitrose, a large Co-op. The huge factor would be the different level of rates and rent.

Go for independents in Bournemouth. No building societies, accountants, lawyers or estate agents in shops with display windows! They kill shopping streets. Only allow shops or cafés with front windows with actual stuff to sell or eat. Have a section with a range of food stores, possibly built into a defunct department store. We have a good Waterstones, but it’s small compared to Bath. It’s the only book shop. Tiny Bridport has a Waterstones and THREE Antiquarian book stores.

Old Christchurch Road – encourage independent shops. Too many TO LET signs now

Bournemouth, unusually, has not allowed charity shops in the town centre (a blight everywhere else). I think they’re right. Chichester has a side street full of them.

MARKETS & SPECIAL EVENTS

Events attract people. According to the web, Bournemouth has 500 events a year. Hmm.

The French Market weekend was a good idea, though Tesco in Branksome complained on the Sunday that they had no baguettes or croissants to sell because the French stallholders had bought the lot to sell at triple Tesco’s price in the market. That sort of market works because it’s just a day or two. Frome has a Sunday one, once a month.

One of the earlier Christmas markets

The Christmas Market? On balance it’s negative for me. The town stinks of hot dogs and mulled wine. If you are a retailer paying rates 52 weeks a year, it is infuriating to find on the busiest weeks of the year, cheap stalls are taking your food and drink trade, or your Christmas gift trade. One shop owner told us that she paid rates, only to find she couldn’t sell shawls or pashminas in December because a temporary wooden stall took all the business. Also double glazing and magnetic bracelets are not what you see in German Christmas markets. Winchester’s market by the cathedral, away from the main shops with an ice rink for children seems positive. Bournemouth’s adult boozing one doesn’t.

Other towns have festivals … the Brighton Festival is major, Norwich has similar, and then there’s the Cheltenham Literary Festival, the Oxford Literary Festival, Salisbury has an Arts Festival and so on. Bournemouth has tried literature and arts and the results are feeble. Bournemouth’s big one is the Air Festival which attracts huge crowds, but they are attracted first to the cliffs and beaches rather than the centre.

Some sort of event week or two in Spring would be good. It has to be on a much more vigorous highly-publicized large scale than past ventures..

ROADWORKS & THE A338

 To me, a major culprit, the nail in the coffin for Bournemouth as a shopping centre, was the A338 roadworks. They started with ludicrous “save the reptile” works and fencing. Absurd. There were several hundred yards of heathland or more stretching back on either side. To rational people, the adders and lizards would simply shift themselves 50 yards away from the road as the work started. No, no. They had to have habitat protection. (And to be honest, St Patrick rid Ireland of poisonous snakes. So why are we worried about saving the odd adder which decides to slither onto a highway? Though as snakes fear vibration, they probably wouldn’t).

Then the works didn’t have the third lane in spite of huge expense. They then cleared the gorse bushes at the sides that had caught cars sliding off the road, to leave a deep ditch where they could turn over instead.

The A338 in 2018, Evening Echo photo

They did not solve the problem of clodhopper Dorset Police refusing to divert cars when the road is blocked by accidents either. There are two kinds of Sat Nav, one uses cameras on fixed points, the other uses data fed back from commercial vehicles. Mine never tells me when the A338 is blocked. Everyone I know realised the solution to these two hour A338 traffic standstills after an accident. All you need is a couple of access points to Matcham’s Lane, closed off with metal barriers, which can be opened by the police only when there is an accident blocking the A338 road.

Example: A few years ago we were heading north on the A338 towards Southampton. There was a minor shunt … no ambulances  … where the road from Christchurch comes onto the A338 going South. The police had closed the road totally. The traffic jam stretched beyond Ringwood. Two hours plus for those coming in. Then we got to Southampton. There was an accident on the M271 going in with two ambulances attending … BUT the police had kept one lane open and we moved slowly through. When I was a boy, Bournemouth was in Hampshire. Apparently, Hampshire police are more intelligent than Dorset Police.

The main thing is that for months, years, you could get stuck in the A338 roadworks for 45 minutes trying to get to Bournemouth. Me? Several times. Then at quiet times of day, it was still 20 to 25 minutes. We spoke to people in Ringwood and Fordingbridge – they started shopping in Salisbury or Southampton rather than face the hold ups. Bournemouth lost business massively because of the roadworks, causing some shops to slip below the viability line. Ringwood has become WAY better for shopping as a result. It has a Waterstones, an Aga shop, a toy shop, several fashion shops (Hobbs, Joules, Fat Face, Phase 8), some individual like Woodsies and Calm Amongst The Chaos rather than just more chain stores. Wimborne meets both my criteria … independent bookshop and record shop.

Salisbury? Well, Putin’s assassins have badly affected the town with the Novichok attack, and it’s not yet fully recovered.

Those ill-planned and inadequate road works screwed Bournemouth totally for shopping at a crucial point.

BIKE LANES

Richmond Hill: the steepness of the hill, the width of the bike lane, plus it has a kerb – it’s not flat with the road

 The council planners are would-be social engineers and cyclists. Many years ago,  Keith Waterhouse wrote that the purpose of a town council was to keep the street lights lit, the municipal baths disinfected,  the sewage flowing, the libraries stocked with books and that was it. No social engineering.

Bike lanes and building bike lanes have disrupted traffic. In that long, long haul in from Wimborne recently (where I had to be at 8 a.m.) I travelled the length of Alder Road between 8.30 and 9.05 am. So it took 35 minutes. Installing the bike lane there caused massive disruption. In THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES in the rush hour I saw only one bike. Anyone could tell them, if you’re a normal cyclist rather than a major competitive sports cyclist, you will avoid Alder Hills. They are too steep.

Similarly, the bike lane with its kerbstone at the side on Richmond Hill benefits only the most vigorous sports cyclist and coincidentally (NOT) leads mainly to and from the Town Hall where I’m told we ratepayers provide hot showers for the cyclists after their sweaty commute. Hang on, the carbon footprint of a car is replaced by the carbon footprint of a hot shower …

A normal cyclist will get off and walk. Richmond Hill is so steep that only electric trolley buses were allowed up in the 1960s. When the first petrol buses were allowed up, I was on one that slid slowy backwards all the way down on a wet road, horn blaring … too many people were standing. My Vespa scooter in the 60s could only just do it. Yes, I realize that gears on modern bikes far surpass my trusty Sturmey-Archer 3 speed, but even so … it’s a very arduous climb. Incidentally, a designer friend enthuses about Richmond Hill – virtually no two buildings are from the same decade.

Many of the bike lanes are for lycra-clad sports cyclists, not a hypothetical family with kids or cheerful cloth-capped workers on their pushbikes (basket for lunch box on the front) on their way to the factory. They are a waste of public money, engineered by an elite group of local government officials with a mission. Cyclists are a vociferous and successful pressure group, and have every right to try, but you have to cost cycle lanes and the likely number of users. It would seem sensible to link the Lansdowne and Talbot Village university campuses for example, not that I see many students cycling.

I’ve lived and worked in different places. London, Oxford, Cambridge and Hull have hundreds of cyclists. They’re flat. Bournemouth never had many cyclists even in the poorer 60s. It’s too hilly particularly around the town centre. If you want to cycle fast for sport, go to a Velodrome. Public money should not be subsidising your hobby. It’s also a hobby for a narrow age group. Kids can’t cycle far on today’s roads. Older people can’t manage the hills.

(Incidentally, Bristol plans to ban all diesel cars 7 am to 3 pm. Bath plans a £9 diesel congestion charge. If the charge area in Bath includes the South Gate car park … literally yards from the ring road … they will be truly shooting themselves in the foot for retail. Bournemouth beware.)

DEVELOPMENT

Halls of Residence, The Lansdowne

And more …

It’s all university, much of which is semi-language school or rather directed at foreign students paying three times UK fees. Massive developments mean the stretch of Holdenhurst Road from Asda to The Lansdowne is where anyone sensible in business would open a shop. It will be pedestianized. It will end up as an alternative new town centre.

Holdenhurst Road, 3 February 2020. The future centre?

The new accommodation is all student. Think what that amount of building would do for social housing. Couldn’t one large hostel for the homeless find space among all that development?