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Guest Author
In this post, Ellen Golding, one of our UCL Bartlett student facilitators for Multigenerational Places: London, reflects on the conversation within her working group with a focus on high streets.
Hello, my name is Ellen. I’m a student at UCL studying Urban Planning, Design and Management, and I’m originally from rural Lancashire.
Last week, I helped facilitate a discussion as part of the WEdesign Multigenerational Places: London event, focusing on high streets. I chose this theme because high streets feel both familiar and uncertain: something I’ve grown up with, yet something that seems to be constantly shifting, especially over the past 50 years.
Coming from rural Lancashire, the high street still plays a central role in everyday life. But within my group, perspectives differed. One participant from Hong Kong hadn’t experienced the “typical” British high street at all, while another from Belgium described growing up around more pedestrianised town squares. It quickly became clear that what we think of as a high street is not universal, but culturally specific.
A recurring idea was that high streets are perceived as a dying form. Many felt they are now used primarily by older generations, while younger people rely on online services. In London, people often travel to high streets they prefer rather than using their closest one, weakening the idea of “local”.
As part of the workshop, we built a model of our ideal high street. We included spaces like libraries for shared learning, affordable shops for everyday needs, and barber shops and beauty salons as key social anchors, especially within communities of colour. These are places where people gather, not just consume.
From there, the conversation shifted towards something less tangible: permission. Permission to linger, to play, to exist in public space without needing to justify your presence.
People spoke about children playing outside salons, buskers and spontaneous dancing, and public squares being used informally. These moments felt valued, yet largely absent. High streets are now treated as places to move through quickly, rather than inhabit.
We linked this to online services and how physical retail has adapted. Independent businesses often become more niche to survive, while chain stores feel increasingly transactional. Both can unintentionally discourage people from lingering or entering at all.
This extends to community spaces. Structured programming, like separate sessions for different groups, can appear inclusive but often separates people by age or interest.
We initially designed our model this way, then questioned it. Are we designing for inclusion, or organising people into silos?
We shifted towards adaptable spaces instead. Spaces that can be used by anyone, at any time, without prescribing how. If we want different generations to mix, we need environments that allow overlap rather than separation.
Ultimately, we kept returning to one question: how do we make people feel allowed in spaces that don’t immediately feel like “theirs”?
High streets are not just declining because of the internet, but because they have become either overly niche or overly generic. Both limit their ability to bring people together.
What high streets can offer is something the internet cannot: shared, spontaneous, human experience.
By creating flexible, welcoming environments, encouraging informal use of space, and removing the pressure to constantly consume, we can begin to re-establish high streets as places to gather, not just to pass through.
Once everyone feels welcome on our high streets, and our high streets feel useful without needing to justify themselves, they can begin to function as what they were always capable of being: multigenerational places.
Ellen is a first-year Urban Planning, Design and Management student at UCL. She is interested in how spaces can be designed to support inclusive, connected communities, and how cities can better support everyday social life at a local scale.