How many times have you visited another town in England, and find that it looks just like the one you just visited? This is the definition of a ‘clone town’. Most high streets are clone towns: they contain the same retail shops, the same coffee chains, the same ‘big charity’ shops that test on animals, the same banks, the same architecture, and often the same kind of bored and uninspired people walking in the streets, who yearn for something different.
The pretty coastal town of Whitstable (Kent) is apparently the least cloned town in England, with more indie shops than anywhere. Nearby is the ancient village of Chiddingstone with its Tudor-style houses and post office, owned by the National Trust. Good as it’s protected, bad as you’ll have to pay a fortune to visit for a cup of tea.
Clone towns are where all the shops are the same: McDonald’s, Costa Coffee, Marks and Spencers, rather than independent bookstores and community shops, owned by local people. You would not know whether you were in a Northumbrian town or a Cornish village.
21st Century syndrome – knowing a place so well, that you’re bored by the time you first visit. Paul Kingsnorth
Understand Your Town’s Unique Identity
What’s the history of your town? Recreating this and bringing personality to where you live restores a sense of pride and belonging, and makes your area feel like home.
For instance, if you live in a Yorkshire coastal village, you could sell vegan Yorkshire puddings in food shops, guides on the Coast-to-Coast walk (that ends when you paddle your toes in Robin Hood’s Bay) and organic cotton t-shirts from local company Indi Clothing. Rather than Yorkshire puddings from big brands that have never visited Yorkshire, autobiographies of vacous celebrities and fast fashion from the Far East.
Rather than selling peat-filled non-native plants, find out what grows in your area and sell organic plants and flowers and trees instead. These will also help local birds and wildlife. Know pet-friendly plants, so you can educate customers.
Create Online Communities
Create loyalty cards (both in person and online) so that local people get incentive discounts to support local independent shops. Create a NextDoor account, to let people know what’s going on in local shops and services.
Consider building a dedicated website or blog. This can be a real hub for celebrating local places and highlighting upcoming events and featuring small independent shop news. This will also help to bring in more tourism income.
What Clone Towns can Learn from Santa Fe
Santa Fe is the capital city of New Mexico (USA) and has inspirational lessons we can learn. A couple of years back, then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak suggested that mathematics was more important than the arts, and people not waste time studying ballet etc.
Of course, often the opposite is true. The arts can inspire more than politics. Sante Fe is a mecca for independent artists, writers and musicians, and as a result, there is not a clone town in site – residents would think it all too boring!
This Spanish-influenced city also has strict building codes, laid out according to ‘Laws of the Indies’ which date back to 1573. The town is laid out around a central plaza (which also happens in Italian cities). So you have a town hall on one side, a church on the other, then a radiating grid of narrow streets and alleys, which are easy to walk to from anywhere, obviously reducing traffic.
In England, we often have to drive to get to places that are a short distance, as the crow flies. It’s not many other places that have cul-de-sacs (nice for a few houses, but sometimes you have to walk miles to get somewhere, due to being ‘cut off’ through a lack of alley paths. This in turn encourages people to drive instead of walk.
It’s not all paradise in New Mexico. A few years back, the state sued the US Environmental Protection Agency over negligence due to a gold mine waste water spill, which flowed heavy metals and arsenic to flow water basis, polluting the Animas River. It did result in stricter regulations, but the state remains a huge producer of greenhouse gases, due to twice the national average emissions with its oil and gas industries.
