n empty Debenhams, a shuttered Marks & Spencer, an abandoned New Look: the town centre of Stockton-on-Tees has suffered a similar fate to countless high streets up and down the UK, struggling to survive in the online shopping, Covid-stricken era. But, while some towns scramble to convert empty department stores into flats, or fill vacant shops with community pop-ups and urban farms, Stockton Council has come up with an altogether bolder proposition for the post-retail age. It plans to demolish half the high street and replace it with a park. “The government asked for ‘transformational’ proposals for our high streets,” says councillor Nigel Cooke, cabinet member for regeneration. “If this is not transformational, I don’t know what is.” If the plans go ahead, the project will see an ailing shopping arcade ripped up and replaced with a riverside park three times the size of Trafalgar Square, providing grandstand views across a bucolic scene of rowing, sailing and waterside promenading along the Tees. As retail continues to retreat, might our future high streets embrace the great outdoors? “Ever since Woolworths closed in 2008, Stockton Council has been rethinking what the town centre should be,” says Cooke. “The future is not more shops. It’s about leisure, culture, events and recreation, and making it a nice place for people to simply be.” Standing in the council’s sights is the Castlegate shopping centre, a tired 1970s retail arcade, hotel and multistorey carpark designed by the notorious architect John Poulson. Stretching over 300 metres along the eastern side of Stockton high street, the building acts as a blunt brick barrier between the town centre and the river, blocking any sense that Stockton is indeed on-Tees. Described by one local blog as “the biggest act of vandalism since Oliver Cromwell demolished Stockton Castle during the civil war”, Poulson’s project trampled a network of Victorian streets that led down to the river, replacing the alleyways with an impermeable, intractable lump, and compounding the sense of severance inflicted by a dual carriageway along the river’s edge. In 1973, a year after the Castlegate centre opened, Poulson was jailed for his role in a web of corruption, bribery and fraud across the north of England, but his legacy would continue to blight Stockton for decades to come. “You can see why they wanted to turn their back on the river in the 1960s,” says Cooke. “It was black. The industry had made it so polluted that there weren’t any fish in it for years, but now we have salmon swimming and rowers gliding through town. The river is a real asset. We’re not ashamed of it any more.” The provisional designs, drawn up by Ryder Architecture and unveiled today, depict a new land-bridge covering part of the riverside road (which will be reduced to two lanes), connecting the high street to the river with a cascading series of steps, forming an informal amphitheatre facing the waterfront. The park itself will include an extension of the market square at the northern end, with space for adjacent restaurants and cafes to spill out on to, along with an undulating playground area, and a large circular lawn for outdoor events. Two new buildings at the southern end of the site will potentially house a new central library, customer service centre and council headquarters, with the council planning to consolidate its 10 existing offices into two. As part of a strategy to concentrate the shops in one place, Castlegate’s existing tenants are being offered the option to move into empty units in the nearby Wellington Square shopping centre, which the council also acquired in 2019. Both had vacancy levels of around 30%, but this way it is hoped they will form one commercially viable centre. To fund the riverside project, the council has secured a total of £36.5m from the Tees Valley Combined Authority and the Government’s Future High Streets Fund, and plans to contribute a further £5m, as well as committing to deliver the offices, at around £30m, to be confirmed in the next phase. “It’s incredibly bold for a council to be operating like this,” says Bill Grimsey, former Iceland chief executive and author of several national reviews on the future of high streets, which have urged a move away from retail. “Stockton is probably the best example in the UK of a town that’s recognised that shops are not going to be the mainstay of town-centre survival in the 21st century and we need to do something radical about it.” A consultation exercise found that 80% of respondents were in favour of demolishing Castlegate, and the Twentieth Century Society is not objecting, but the building is not entirely without its fans. Local film-maker Jonathan Thompson describes parts of the interior as “absolutely stunning”, the soaring, geometric ceiling above the food court as “like a modernist cathedral”. His photographs of the space convey the drama of the original vision, and he urges that at least the market hall and spiralling car park ramp are somehow incorporated into the redevelopment plans. With retrofit and reuse at the forefront of the environmental agenda, given the huge amount of embodied energy locked into existing buildings, demolition should only ever be a last resort; but the council insists that reusing parts of the Castlegate centre would be unviable here. A few Poulson ruins dotted around the site would add a poetically Ozymandian touch, and they might help to mitigate the potential sense of agoraphobia. The plans currently envisage a gargantuan amount of public space for a town of 85,000 people – particularly when it is located right next to the widest high street in the UK. Could it all end up feeling like a barren, windswept expanse, a gaping void in the town’s heart? Cooke is confident that Stockton has the energy to fill it. “We are very much an events town,” he says. “The international riverside festival pulls in hundreds of thousands of people from across the country each year, and we’ve held international athletics and cycling championships on the high street before.” The park’s success will rest on the finer detail of the design, and Ryder don’t have the kind of track record in public realm and landscape design that inspires the confidence they will really pull it off. The council says it is currently “reviewing procurement options” to develop the design, and intends to “engage a contractor at an early stage to maximise innovation and buildability” – which makes the chances of an architectural competition seem sadly unlikely. But the social and cultural life that the park will hopefully support might trump niggles over the design. Annabel Turpin, director of Stockton’s ARC theatre and arts centre, describes the riverside proposals as “visionary”, and sees the park as a canvas for extending the theatre’s programme of performances. She moved to Stockton in 2008 and has witnessed a range of improvements that have transformed the town centre, “from feeling like a neglected northern town into a place you’d be proud to show someone around”. She cites new paving, street furniture, lighting and a big fountain for kids to play in, along with the Stockton Flyer kinetic sculpture , which cheerfully erupts from its plinth in a mad cloud of steam and clanging bells every lunchtime. The council is also funding the refurbishment of the Globe theatre, a 1930s art deco gem, nearing completion at the top end of the high street, and has even built a hotel nearby. Another successful initiative, highlighted in the Grimsey review, has been the transformation of a former department store into an “enterprise arcade”, where startup businesses can take space for as little as £10 a day to try out their format. Around 15 former tenants have already moved into more prominent units in the town centre, aided by £5,000 council grants to help them refurbish vacant shops. “As the big national chain stores move online, we’re seeing a real growth in independent retailers,” says Rachel Anderson, assistant director of policy at the North East Chamber of Commerce. “Stockton has been first out of the blocks to intervene in the market and facilitate these new businesses, and others are following suit. Middlesbrough council recently bought one of its shopping centres to repurpose into a leisure destination, while others are looking at everything from escape rooms to crazy golf.” As anchor tenants depart, there are opportunities for different kinds of uses appearing on high streets, from medical centres to educational colleges. The kinds of things that are often stranded on the outskirts could help to bring life back to the core. As embattled council leaders across the country face the quandary of what to do with their struggling, post-pandemic town centres, they would do well to look at Stockton, quietly leading the way.