Out With The Old (Cities, Towns, Work...). In With The New.

On 23rd March the world went into slowdown, lockdown. Well, we did here in the UK. And still is elsewhere.

One day we’re ants busily, anxiously, blindly scurrying from home to work and back again. 

And then we stopped. Nobody on trains. Empty city streets. London reduced to sleepy village.

The head of the CBI, the organisation which speaks for (many, not all) businesses here in the UK has called on the government to prioritise ‘back to work’ with the same vigour as back to school, citing the businesses - basketmakers, coffeemakers and dry-cleaning makers - likely crushed by the empty streets, the disappeared footfall.

People must go back to work to save the economy, they say.

People must go back to work to save our cities, they say.

People must go back to work to awaken ‘ghost towns’, they say.

I say not.

Short Term, Painful Change Is Coming.

Yes, a short term, painful change is coming.

There are many businesses built on the assumptions of yesterday. This is true for the big, as well as the small. My interest is the small. The nimble, the adaptive, the evolutionary.

A failing business is painful. It’s a worry. I know, I’ve been there.

Yet the pioneers of the ‘at risk’ businesses - the coffee shops, the dry cleaners, the sandwich shops - are energetic, resilient, adaptable. They can and will bounce back.

Just not where they were before.

I live in Brighton.

About 5,000 people a day used to leave Brighton and commute to work elsewhere. Many of these to London. They buy the coffees, use the dry cleaners and eat the sandwiches of the myriad mini entrepreneurs whose businesses are at risk from the changing context.

The CBI want us back to work, back to London, to help these businesses. Actually they want us back to work to help these businesses to help their members, but that’s a different story.

Too late, I say. The genie is out of the bottle.

Change Is Already On Us

The change is on us.

Take the Brighton 5,000.

They don’t go to London anymore. That’s a few less ants stomping through the streets.

Yes London might be more ghost town. but Brighton is an alive town. And this will be played out in communities and towns and cities across the land.

The sandwich and coffee shops in Brighton are buzzing. The co-working spaces the same. London’s loss will be other places gain. That these people are not spending in London doesn’t mean they’re not spending. They’re spending elsewhere. In their towns, the communities, their homes, perhaps?

Yes, businesses will go bust. And the smaller, entrepreneur owned ventures will go first. That is bad.

Yet these people will bounce back. They will go where the opportunities are. And where these opportunities are will shift. They will shift away from the faceless big cities, to the local communities.

This will mark a wider, more profound shift.

A shift to doing business as a community, in community. Our strength is in numbers. Businesses built on shared values, mutual benefit, on principles of adaptable, entrepreneurial, community; a cooperative mindset.

And let these changes impact the mega corps who make up CBI’s membership. They will feel the pain second, but the pain is coming. The old models of work, just like the old locations, will be challenged like never before.

Bring it on.

All power to the small, the entrepreneurial, the locally minded, the community focused, the networked, adaptable and the positive.

Let the ghost towns ghost. And let life breathe into new places, new towns, new cities, new communities, new opportunities and new ideas.

Out with the old, in with the new.