Healthy High Streets

Overview

The death of the high street was being foretold as early as 1938, with fears being expressed about the personal and local character of shops disappearing, yet now more than ever there is a desire to find ways to make local places beneficial for people’s health and wellbeing. This project has evolved over the past decade to study the historical evolution of the high street. It has already established empirically that high streets have always had a much wider role to play than purely for shopping, as places of production, and as social, communal, and leisure settings, and that they have an embedded potential – as the most central places to their locality – to serve a vital role into the future.

Healthy Urban Places

A current research project – Healthy Urban Places – of which Professor Laura Vaughan is Deputy Director, is a consortium funded by UKRI as part of a £35 million network running till 2028. It seeks to characterise the high street environments in two northern English cities, Bradford and Liverpool, drawing on a salutogenic perspective – one that views health as an ongoing and relational process. The research examines those features of high streets that consistently support or constrain everyday wellbeing. The team focuses on analysing the street network, built form and land use patterns, accounting for complementarity and balance for each high street case study site in three epochs: 1900s, 1960s and 2020s. This characterisation enables the team to assess the history of a place as a contributory factor in wellbeing in its own right, by considering the effect of place on wellbeing in the sense of health-giving properties, ownership (familiarity) and belonging of places.

Related research

Vaughan, L. (2022). Butcher, baker, candlestick-maker and… healthcare centre? Journal of Urban Design, 27(1), 69–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2022.1994772

This research article forms part of a longstanding study that originates in UKRI EPSRC/ESRC research into successful town centres dating back to 2008. It is founded in the space syntax theory of the movement economy, which argues that street centrality can develop at multiple scales, shaping the adaptability of the building in local centres such as high streets. Rather than being repurposed mainly for leisure, we can build on the embedded spatial potential of historically successful high streets, namely on their ability to forge connections through and between local centres. This will in turn create opportunities for local places of work, social gathering and facilities such as healthcare centres.

Image: Gort Scott Ltd, from Scott, F. (2015). "Case Study 1: High Street Productivity." In Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street, edited by L. Vaughan, 204–222. London: UCL Press.