Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

as a cheapskate who only buys 2nd hand books, i like the high streets that are lined w charity shops

The only actual shops left are WH Smiths, JD Sports, MacDonalds, and a fuckload of charity and pound shops.

Don't tell me the tanning salons have gone tits up? ;_;

Pretty sure London's a different case entirely

Different to Hackney?

hackney is the centre of the universe

it is though! for me.

But if the people with the disposible income aren't going there and putting money into it then you might as well blame them, or blame Broadway Market or somewhere, as much as Tesco.

broadway market is only on saturdays. the rest of the time bway market shopping is basically on par with well street unless you want some expensive coffee table books or argentinian steak - which i don't think is too much of a threat to well street businesses.

what should people w/disposable income be putting money into? the shops that couldn't compete with tesco are gone now.

I get a bus through Paisley every other day and I've never noticed that many fake shops - either they're really convincing at masquerading as shops, or they're so terrible that I don't take them in as shops at all. Either way I can't imagine being able to feel less suicidal when spending time there.

It's in the pedestrianised bit where citizens are able to browse fake shops at their leisure

Tracer - I think it's as likely to be a result of hiked up rents as the arrival of a Tesco there, although one may feed into the other its also a result of ongoing gentrification surely?

The irony is that in the longer term you might see a Well Street or equivalent market as full of the sort of independent businesses that the Stokey/anti-Nando's crew want to see, that are out of reach to people living in nearby estates, who'll be shopping oh guess where? It's as much a feature of the socio-economic changes taking place in the East End as anything else, and will get even pronounced in the aftermath of the Olympics and the housing benefit cuts kicking in.

i don't really understand how w.h. smiths survive, to be honest.

no one buys books. everything else is cheaper at tesco and stocked there, except for, i don't know, board games and some stationery.

strangely there's not a lot of gentrification going on around well street. there are very nice houses around cassland road but they've always been nice. and the rest is estates. about 80% of well street patrons are from estates.

there's an argument that says you don't have to have high prices to sell to poor people. i.e. stack em high, sell em cheap. and indeed i think starbucks would do very poorly on well street. even costa. but nobody can stack em as high as tesco.

Yeah but the landlord will be charging, or trying to charge, the market rate and that'll be distorted by what's happening elsewhere in the borough. It's also as much as issue of anticipated gentrification as actual gentrification.

Tom D, the tanning salons are all still around, just not on the High Street. I forgot, there's a cafe which keeps changing names every couple of months, punctuated by periods of vacantness. I've never seen anyone in any variation of it.

what i don't understand is why a landlord would prefer an empty shop (about half the shops on well street are empty, some for several years) to a trader tenant. even if the trader isn't maying very much in rent it's SOMETHING, and that trader's going to be doing the kind of routine upkeep that helps retain some value in the property. and presumably, a street full of shops is going to boost everyone's property values in a way that a half empty street doesn't. but instead of filling the empty shops the landlords on well street are asking the well street shopkeepers to pay (in some cases) more than triple their current rent (which is admittedly currently hilariously low).

actually i think it may be down to the vacant shops being now in a terrible condition and the landlords simply not having the cash to make them worth anyone's time to move in.

They should get Christo to wrap a whole town centre with sheet saying "This could be a high street".

In the early '90s - before Shoreditch became what it now is - landlords offered generous rent-free periods to live/work and commercial tenants to allow for renovations.

Ailsa you forgot M&S. The fake bakery in Paisley High Street is brilliant - they've blown the photos up so big the loaves are all HUGE. I would buy all of this fake bread!

I will be walking past it in a couple of hours, I'll try to remember to get a photo.

Fake Department Store and Fake Toy Shop

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paisleyorguk/4745451485/in/photostream/

Found one of the Big Bread
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paisleyorguk/4745444303/in/photostream/

Thinking that, in Paisley, fake shops might be a popular idea, you don't have to spend any money in them for a start

I took a photo of the fake Italian deli in Dumbarton High Street the other month.

aldo, did you post yr Bristol info on that grau thread alba linked in the end? think it's the kind of stuff that would be really useful in the non-ilx public domain.

I thought about it, but after reading the comments thread it seemed fairly pointless as everyone seems to have made their mind up already.

What I love best about that Paisley Flickr is the captions all calling the imaginary shops by their original names, eg "this is 'Littlewoods'" or "this is 'Burger King'" - I think that's why I've never really took in the absurdity of the fake shops, in my head it's still 1995 and there's still lots of shops. At least the fake shopfronts give a glimmer of hope - there are shops inside Paisley's shopping centre which have been sitting vacant for ten years and more which haven't been touched at all.

fair enough

xp

Ailsa you forgot M&S

So I did. It's not even a real M&S, it's an outlet store selling stuff that was in real M&S stores four years ago anyway.

The fake bistro on the corner of Causeyside Street looks nicer than anything left in Paisley.

fuck...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1255162/Fake-shopfronts-built-improve-look-recession-hit-high-streets.html

― Some other race (nakhchivan), Tuesday, 26 April 2011 07:40 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

We have something similar to this in Pittsburgh, although rather than throw up tacky vinyls the Urban Redevlopment Agency pays for facade restoration and curtains are typically hung in the windows. It makes the street look much neater. Its a 'Broken Windows' thing.

I thought about it, but after reading the comments thread it seemed fairly pointless as everyone seems to have made their mind up already.

But if people like you don't post then that's way it's going to look blah blah. Oh well, thanks for thinking about it.

I know we've got the Ayrshire/Lanarkshire thread, and the Glasgow thread, but is there an actual Paisley/Renfrewshire thread? I imagine ilx would be able to offer a fair bit of knowledge regarding local hidden gems and regional nostalgia.

(also, bear in mind that many more people read those threads than actually post to them - the people on the thread aren't necessarily representative of the people reading something you post)

Sorry, should probably disclose that I'm working for the Guardian again and have an interest in making those those threads as good as they can be.

is there an actual Paisley/Renfrewshire thread? I imagine ilx would be able to offer a fair bit of knowledge regarding local hidden gems and regional nostalgia.

I think most of trying to forget, not remember

I have no regional nostalgia, having inherited this dump through marriage. Feel free to start one though, I may contribute stuff about pubs (since that's all I really go into Paisley for these days. That, and to look at fake shop fronts, obv).

Alba, if you want me to post something then I will later tonight. IS that still the most appropriate thread?

Yes. Cheers!

Brilliant. By the time I hit send it linked to a page that the website said didn't exist any more, having rejected a valid login twice, and hitting back showed the page had deleted it all as temporary data.

I'd love to help but frankly I'm not typing it all in again. Maybe this is a contributing factor why you don't get the web attention you might want.

Err, blimey, I've not heard of problems like that. Sorry aldo.

(you're not qwan, then?)

Not your fault, don't worry about it. Unless you're the webmaster, obviously.

I probably need to read it again then if qwan is putting some things forward - I believe my friend colin_cusion has been commenting too.

Alba, I've been back in and have commented a couple of times. We've just all been moved on from there by the writer into the response thread for Zoe Williams' latest column, which completely ignores the things that have been written in the other one and trills the same party line without question (although adding a line about middle-class anti-Sainsbury's guilt as well) and repeats things which have been consistently disproven. Seriously mate, when your own journalists don't read your own relevant web content for an article they're writing that very week, it's hard to see why there's any value in it for members of the public. Either that or the Guardian are employing people who are a fucking disgrace to the notion of what a journalist might be, in which case I'd rather stock shelves than associate with this kind of oxygen thief lest I be tarred with the same brush.

I'm half-tempted to out why I was in there in the first place to expose the shame, but nobody associated with the paper would read it on this evidence.

All I can really say here is that I'll raise your concerns.

(you might actually be amazed how much editors read and talk about threads. Writers, maybe not as much)

Seriously mate, when your own journalists don't read your own relevant web content for an article they're writing that very week, it's hard to see why there's any value in it for members of the public. Either that or the Guardian are employing people who are a fucking disgrace to the notion of what a journalist might be, in which case I'd rather stock shelves than associate with this kind of oxygen thief lest I be tarred with the same brush.

i hear money supermarket can get you some great deals?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/apr/26/dorking-homeowners-insurance-rise

Which specific things do you think should not have been printed in the ZW piece?

The specific thing is that she's still repeating the "residents don't want it" line - this has been robustly debunked several times and the majority figure claimed by the protesters comes from respondents to a website and domain specifically created to oppose the store.

The squat is not unconnected to the protest, as she claims, again comprehensively debunked. There has been lots of evidence presented that in Bristol it is not "self-evident", as she claims, that "supermarkets destroy local shops". She makes a point about licensing, implying that Tesco looked to exploit the previous use regulations to bypass alcohol planning issues, but has failed to check that Tesco have pledged not to sell alcohol from these premises (which they did in response to the second appeal by the protesters) and that the previous licence had lapsed as the building had been vacant for >12 months in any case.

The most annoying, which isn't the same thing at all, is where she says the whole point is about communities caring about their members and each other while not addressing the third brothel that opened in Stokes Croft to no protest whatsoever (the only area of Bristol this has ever happened in) which doesn't seem particularly coomunity-minded.

Also, the editors might want to read the bit in the comments thread where she blames them for the failure of any of the readers to understand completely what she means.

Ah no wait, she doesn't blame the editors. She just accuses people who disagree with her of not reading what she writes properly.

Actually, it's OK, I've read your post on the ZW thread. I actually think you're being a bit harsh. Her piece is a general op-ed about the issue of supermarkets and planning permission, making relatively little reference to the Stokes Croft case. It's a peg to hang it - and the headline - on, but the talk of the local objections is made in a deliberately cursory way because she's using it as a jumping off point for the meat of the article, and the case she can talk about with more authority: the Sainsbury's in south London. I do agree that the "Residents and some councillors insist" line in itself makes it look like it's all residents and some councillors, but given that it's in a paragraph about "irreconcilable assertions" it doesn't quite carry that force.

As for her section about licensing, well that doesn't mention Stokes Croft at all. Is the preceding point the Stokes Croft Tesco site having been a comedy club invalid re: planning permission just because it had been closed for a year? I'm not sure.

Anyway, yes, I can see how if you think the story has been misreported in the media then another piece that doesn't question the narrative of locals v supermarkets is annoying, but when a columnist like ZW is looking for (or is given) a news story as a jumping off point for a general piece they want to write, I'm not sure that's the place where you can necessarily expect that questioning to occur. The story is likely to diverge from the detail of the story at that point, not narrow in on disputed facts.

xpost

The squat is not unconnected to the protest, as she claims,

She doesn't claim this, though. She says the squatters say they were connected, again in a paragraph about "assertions". Is it wrong to say the squatters say this? If so, fair enough.

Also, it's quite possible to believe that "supermarkets destroy local shops" without believing that they do in all circumstances.