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The beating heart of our communities: Citizen Portraits from East Midlands and East London
9 January 2024
In this edition of Citizen Portraits, we travelled to the East Midlands and East London to capture the small business owners and workers who play host to the beating heart of the places we call home.
Check out this and other pieces in the latest UCL Policy Lab magazine. To find out more about Policy Lab and get the latest news events, sign up for their newsletter here.
Boarded-up shops and empty high streets have become the backdrop to so many communities. It has fostered a feeling of loss, not just of economic activity but also of the social connection that is the beating heart of a place.
Yet there is another story, one of reliance and innovation—one that is as old as the high street itself. When Napoleon said Britain was a nation of shopkeepers, it was meant as an insult, a nod to what he saw as the parochial nature of the country he sought to conquer.
What it truly gave voice to was the ambitious inventiveness of Britain’s small enterprises. The chaotic and joyful expression of a thousand ideas cooked up over a thousand kitchen tables. Alive in every small town and each big city.
Britain’s high streets today continue to play home to so much innovation. A shift to online shopping and rising costs have placed a real burden on the workers and entrepreneurs that make our high streets what they are.
Many of those we met spoke of their future ambitions, successes, and sense of comradeship with their fellow shopkeepers and workers. They spoke of new ideas for reimagining our town and city centres.
And there is hope. Across the country, people are working together to rethink how we reimagine our high streets for a new age, as Josh Wrestling from Power to Change says in his essay for the UCL Policy Lab website. Communities across the UK are developing new and inventive ways to redesign our high streets.
From delivering services to expanding music venues and leisure facilities, communities are coming together and collaborating to energise the high street. After all – it isn’t just effort and enterprise that we see in the faces of our shopkeepers. It is pride in serving the communities they call home, in good times and bad.