High Street
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Romsey is a small town in Hampshire, in the south of England.
Introduction
In early 2020 high streets in villages, towns and cities across the UK were closed down by the Covid-19 pandemic. When they reopened that summer there had been some losses and some gains influenced no doubt by a change in shopping habits that was more reliant on online shopping.
The Third Age Trust decided that it would be a good idea to see whether those changes were permanent. Could the High Street recover, and if so, would it be in a new form? They set up a national High Street survey to record information about how the High Street appeared once it reopened. Romsey U3A’s Architecture and Local History Group took up the challenge in September 2020, along with teams in all the other towns taking part, and set to work.
Our approach.
The shopping areas of the town were divvied up between volunteer teams of two – one a note taker and one a photographer. Each shop in the town centre was photographed for the survey and the results were uploaded onto the national survey website.
The intention was to repeat the exercise in September 2021 to see what changes had occurred in the intervening period. Had there been permanent changes and was there a trend in what changes there had been? A smaller team of volunteers set out to photograph the changes, which in turn were uploaded to the national website. The aim is to have old and new pictures sitting beside each other, so the changes can be easily seen.
As many of the photos as possible have been geolocated using Latitude and Longitude references so that website users can see where the businesses are located in the town, as well as what they look like.
The Third Age Trust has now been decided to extend the project to cover a ten-year period. A small team of volunteers in our u3a has agreed to carry it forward for the next nine years. The results to date are available on the national website.
[Page updated 01.02.2022]