by Joy Horn // Main Photo: Mrs M. Ede, returning from a daily visit to the shops, about 1940 (courtesy of Vera Wilkinson)
Cranleigh High Street has lost a high proportion of the shops it had in the 20th century. This is not peculiar to Cranleigh. Many towns and villages have fared worse than we have. After all, we still have an excellent butcher’s, fishmonger’s, baker’s, a post office, 2nd-hand bookshop, cobbler’s and two women’s fashion shops. But the variety of shops has gone. We now have something like 19 restaurants, pubs and take-aways, 9 tea and coffee shops, 17 barbers, hairdressers and beauty shops, 5 estate agents and 5 charity shops. And currently there are 12 empty shops.
What has brought this about? Everyone has their own suggestions. Here are some possible factors.
The improvement in household equipment, in particular the development of affordable fridges and freezers, has reduced the number of visits to food shops. Whereas within living memory meat and milk were kept in perforated zinc-and-wood meat safes, situated in the coolest part of the house, now food can be kept fresh much longer in a fridge. The advert by Farrow’s electrical goods shop says it all. In 1959, only about 13% of homes had a refrigerator, but in the 1960s they became common and were soon viewed as an essential item. Adverts ceased in local papers for farms and dairies offering deliveries of dairy produce daily or even twice daily.
Another factor is the increase in the number of women out at work, because of the need to have two salaries to afford the mortgage on even a modest house. This means that families have had to streamline their visits to the shops, ideally doing a major shop only once a week. The growth in car ownership has made this bulk shopping possible.
All these factors lead to the two biggest causes of the shops’ decline. The first is the growth of the supermarkets. The moderate-sized Co-op store that was in the centre of the village from the late 1950s seems to have had no serious effect on other shops. The same was true of the moderate-sized Gateway, followed by Safeway, roughly on the present Sainsbury’s site. But the new and large Co-op that opened in 2000, and the Sainsbury’s and M&S which followed during the next few years, welcome as they were (and are) in many ways, spelt the disappearance of many smaller food shops, which could not compete for choice, price or convenience.
The second major cause of the High Street shops’ decline has been, of course, the rise of internet shopping. Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989. The first on-line retail sale is said to have been made in 1994 (though there are various claims) and Amazon was launched in 1995 from Jeff Bezos’s rented garage in Washington state, selling just books at first. The next year, Sainsbury’s was probably the first major grocery store in the UK to provide a home shopping service, followed of course by every other major store.
The Covid19 pandemic and lockdown accelerated the move to internet shopping because using the High Street shops became inconvenient and difficult. People in Cranleigh who had never before used the internet for ordering food worked out the procedure and discovered how simple it was. On-line food delivery rocketed throughout the world. Cranleigh people then began to buy other things – clothes, sports goods, tools, electrical appliances – in fact, items of every kind. And the unintended effect is seen in the vacant shops, while busy internet delivery vans are in every street.
Finally, if all this were not enough, the recent steep rise in shop-lifting and violence to shop staff is yet another problem facing our hard-pressed High Street shops.
The Cranleigh History Society meets on the second Thursday of each month at 8pm in the Band Room. The next meeting is on Thursday July 10th, when Nigel Balchin will speak on ‘A postcard from Ewhurst’.
