It is not news that the British high street is in a worrying state of decline. Figures from Power To Change, an organisation providing grants to local communities to invest in ‘community businesses’, suggest that 16% of shops on the country’s high streets are currently empty. Wymondham’s high street is sadly becoming an unwelcome example of this concerning trend.
Walking from Town Green to the Market Cross takes in six empty lets, all of which have become vacant in the past three years. This period has invariably been challenging for businesses, let alone independent retailers or restaurants, with the pandemic being served with a chaser of an economic crisis. Indeed, research conducted by PWC last year shows that 62% of people are visiting their high street less now than they were before Covid-19. Can we say, in truth, that our high street was in the strongest place before these crises came long? Having grown up in Wymondham at the turn of the millennium and returned here in 2020, I am not sure how much our high street has really evolved in this period despite the town seeing vast increases in its population and developments of other facilities such as the Leisure Centre & Kett’s Park.
The future of our town centre is for us to decide. The same PWC research found two-thirds of respondents wanting more local, independent retailers and restaurants opening in their towns. Many people I have spoken to in Wymondham pine for the same. For this to happen, we must give confidence to potential investors by ensuring existing businesses continue to perform strongly. We must proactively choose our town centre over a jaunt up the A11 to Norwich or an online order.
We may, perhaps, need to go further still. Communities across the UK are taking these matters into their own hands. There are now 150 pubs in the UK owned by community groups with 250 pending applications for similar schemes currently underway. This compares to just 14 examples of this ownership model in 2010. There are plentiful examples of community enterprises - cafes, youth centres, retail businesses - breathing new life into empty lets. Just down the road in Diss, the town’s Community Team has taken on a lease for a unit which allows a number of smaller traders to split the rent and overheads whilst Norwich Mustard was set up in the wake of Colman’s exiting the city in 2020.
Wymondham is full of people who value our town and its community. Whether it is events such as Wynterfest or the Jazz Picnic or the emotion with which people clamoured for change at the Abbey, it is regularly evident that we live in a strong and engaged community. I think it is time we showed this on our high street too.
