MONO SENSUAL OR MULTI SENSUAL EXPERIENCES?

Everyone agrees - the High Street is dead. No one wants to shop there anymore as more and more purchases are done on line and 'real estate' purchases are consolidated into regional shopping centres and retail parks. No one wants to shop in tired streets with tired shop fronts in front of tired fit outs served by tired (zero hours) staff. So - goodbye High Street.....

 

And yet there are some signs of life, like determined weeds pushing their way through cracks in concrete, new ideas and new concepts emerge as they are bound to do because we are creative souls and sensory beings and in the end, purchases made on Amazon, Alibaba, Ebay, are soulless purchases lacking the magic, theatre, joy, mystery of a visit to a real shop in a real marketplace served by real people committed to the product they are selling.

Consider a visit to a market - it can be your local farmers market, a traditional market you visited when on holiday in Turkey, an 'antique' flea market in France or a hawkers market in Hong Kong  - any lively healthy market - and then consider the assault on your senses and on your wit that the market presents - smell, taste, touch, sounds and sight are all fully engaged and the brain is fully alert to the nuances of product and price and it is the environment, the three dimensional physical environment created by the market which is the experience.

Now consider the last purchase you made online. You input your search criteria, you are presented with a list of prioritised products to match  and you compare, decide, click, confirm, pay and a robot somewhere in a supershed cranks into action to source, select, package and dispatch to your delivery address. And now consider how many senses were engaged in that purchase - one, your eyes through the medum if the screen and it is not until it arrives and you open the box that the other four come into play as a consequence of which your hands, nose, tongue and ears have been excluded from the experience of the purchase. It may be that for everyday purchases this is irrelevant  - after all its the same loo roll/washing powder/cat food. But for products which touch your skin, things you eat, read, listen to, for these the real world trumps the virtual one very time

Consider the rise in Street Food or Market Food - already the hype is becoming almost too much for the concept to bear as asset managers try to reposition their tired food courts as 'food halls' and doors are thrown open to craft beer makers and coffee roasters but lets go along with it for now - and two of the key reasons why they are popular are

  1. they provide a real three dimensional fully immersive environment full of fresh ideas (like a  market) and
  2. they provide a space for socialising, for sharing and meeting (like a market)

Now consider the kind of environments that street food likes to occupy - it tends to be repurposed industrial or commercial buildings, defined by exposed structure, raw surfaces, high volumes, redundant machinery or processes etched into the fabric, somewhere with a story to tell that goes back beyond the current use and which will remain after the traders and buyers have gone (in fact this desire to create and believe in stories of places is now causing an epidemic of catering interiors that invent the myths as an additional layer where none really exist and at great expense - to be explored in another blog on the myth of authenticity).

The High Street has plenty of such places, such opportunities to uncover and celebrate real life stories that happened in real places and we  firmly believe that the High Street can host new experiences that will bring life back to the High Street once again. Experiential retail cannot solve the problem alone and town centres need to be reoccupied with residential and workspace and all of the social, cultural, healthcare, educational uses that were stripped away as a result of the homogonisation in the 20th century - but there are pleanty of places to go burrowing and plenty of landowners seeking a future for their tired building stock so get in touch if you have some

Now consider the kind of environments that street food likes to occupy - it tends to be repurposed industrial or commercial buildings, defined by exposed structure, raw surfaces, high volumes, redundant machinery or processes etched into the fabric, somewhere with a story to tell that goes back beyond the current use and which will remain after the traders and buyers have gone (in fact this desire to create and believe in stories of places is now causing an epidemic of catering interiors that invent the myths as an additional layer where none really exist and at great expense - to be explored in another blog on the myth of authenticity).

 

The High Street has plenty of such places, such opportunities to uncover and celebrate real life stories that happened in real places and we  firmly believe that the High Street can host new experiences that will bring life back to the High Street once again. Experiential retail cannot solve the problem alone and town centres need to be reoccupied with residential and workspace and all of the social, cultural, healthcare, educational uses that were stripped away as a result of the homogonisation in the 20th century - but there are pleanty of places to go burrowing and plenty of landowners seeking a future for their tired building stock so get in touch if you have some

Tags: Wren, Urban desig, Regeneration, Economy

Back to all posts