‘Big mausoleums of stuff’: Cheltenham is latest town to mourn loss of beloved department store

If you wanted to look at the struggles of the British high street, Cheltenham would not necessarily be the first place to start. There are no boarded-up shop windows or empty windswept streets, no surplus of betting offices and charity shops. Nor do outlets with the word “pound” in their titles loom conspicuously large.

On the contrary, the handsome town centre streets are bustling, business seems to be, if not booming, then not exactly in existential crisis. So it is not hard to believe, on a bright Wednesday afternoon, that all is right in the world – or at least in this affluent corner of Gloucestershire.

Except, that is, for the “closing down” sale signs that decorate the shopfront of Cavendish House, the department store that has been Cheltenham’s retail landmark for two centuries. Occupying the prime site on the elegant Promenade, the store was for generations a symbol of and destination for well-heeled townsfolk, but it will close for good in April.

“It was a lovely shop,” says Kate Ashby, who with her sister Rose used to work in its accounts department in the 1960s. “It had a hairdressing salon, a lovely food hall, wooden floors and beautiful displays in the window.” Back in those days, there were strict staff – and clientele – hierarchies and personalised customer service of the kind that was gently mocked in the 1970s sitcom Are You Being Served?.

“It was an expensive shop,” says Rose. “Lots of people had accounts. There was a beautiful restaurant on the second floor.”

But as the social structures of that era have become unglued, many department stores have found it difficult to reinvent themselves. Walk around Cavendish House now and it is a rather dark and gloomy place.

The broadcaster and retail consultant Mary Portas calls these once dominant stores “big mausoleums of stuff” that have failed to set themselves apart. Some department stores such as Selfridges and Liberty have managed to thrive by making themselves into well-targeted destination experiences, she says, but many more have lacked the imagination and direction to pull out of their death spirals.

In Cheltenham, people tend to attribute Cavendish House’s demise to billionaire businessman Mike Ashley, who bought its parent company, House of Fraser, in 2018, which was also the year John Lewis opened a nearby branch. He is arguably even less admired in the town than he was in Newcastle when he owned that city’s football club. Yet House of Fraser was in administration when Ashley acquired it and he has managed to turn round the company’s fortunes with the renamed and newly profitable Frasers Group, which includes Sports Direct and clothing brand Jack Wills.

“That’s just clever people doing well with margins and making the numbers work, while losing the equity of the brand and what it means to people,” says Portas.

She believes that if the high street is going to rediscover its identity and purpose, businesses need to think of their wider social impact, what they give back to a community, not just what they can extract.

Like most passersby outside Cavendish House, Sharon Williams, who works in retail herself, says she is sad that the department store is closing, even though she no longer shops there.

Sadness at something’s passing, of course, does not always equate to a desire for it to go on living. It is probably fair to say that, for many of us, the contemporary shopping experience includes elements of nostalgia, hypocrisy and laziness.

For who does not lament the closing of some beloved local shop while, from the comfort of our armchairs, we search out online bargains liberated from the financial burdens of commercial rent and rates?

Online commerce, says Portas, has been this century’s “biggest fundamental shift in the way we live and shop”. Although it has undercut the high street, leaving many shops in an economic fight for survival, it has also cleared out some of the chains that had turned high streets into what Portas calls “clone towns”.

These chains, she says, felt no “allegiance” to the towns they withdrew from. There was no sense of locality or individuality. And these are the qualities that high streets need to rediscover.

Once cause for optimism, says Portas, is the death of ultra-consumerism – the kind that traded particularly in cheap clothing, oblivious to its environmental cost. “The new messaging is about recycling, upcycling, vintage and shopping in a more considered way,” she says; a consumer trend, she adds, that has been jet-propelled by the cost of living crisis.

She could imagine a department store in which one floor was given over to vintage and recycled clothes, and perhaps one dedicated to vinyl and music, another to a creche and restaurants where children could be looked after. “What we’re lacking in these businesses,” she says, “is innovation.”

Ask people what they want on a high street, and they will often mention things such as hardware stores and fishmongers. One reason why such shops are so few and far between is the expense. The average annual rental price a square foot for retail properties in the UK is about £25 (though in prime spots it can be 10 times that amount). In general, business rates amount to about half the cost of rent. So a medium-sized shop could be about £75,000 down before it even thinks about salaries or other costs. That’s a lot of shrimps and screws.

Reform of the commercial rates system and some kind of rent control would help if it favoured local needs and penalised, for example, the umpteenth estate agent in a street.

Department stores, which once aimed to sell everything, were an economy-of-scale answer to individual shops. But research suggests that nowadays we want a more bespoke shopping experience. That accounts for the rise of artisanal food shops and local farmers’ markets.

Alexandra Shulman, former editor of British Vogue, says that if you put these changes together with a growing consciousness about the carbon cost of driving to out-of-town shopping centres, and the collapse of several online fashion businesses, there is the start of “shift towards the old-fashioned idea of a high street”. It is a concept that requires verve and imagination, as well as local government support and some decent planning.

Cheltenham MP Alex Chalk wants to see Cavendish House turned into a “mixed-use development with a blend of retail, recreation and quality town centre accommodation”.

That is a formula that could mean anything. But the chance of getting it right would be much improved, says Portas, by listening to what local people actually want and need.