You can't shop - they've already dropped

From the age of about 13 onwards, shopping in the Silver Arcade in Leicester and in and around Hockley etc. in Nottingham was a luxury Saturday pastime. Limitless were the joys of Gridiron, Rollersnakes and Gforce in Nottingham and Black Cat Books, Wardrobe and Well Gosh in Leicester.

These have now all gone in favour of bullshit empty boutiques, arcades full of high street clones and faux teen hangouts. In fact the only one left to my knowledge is Backlash in Nottingham, which is still a pleasure to shop at the grand old age of 35.

There are many folk fighting for Independent retailers (Karl McKeever for one), but help really needs to come from city councils as they have the allotted budgets to assist these retailers. The authorities must do something with the money - they just don't do it very well, thus the empty unit effigies to my former favourite places. Nottingham and Leicester are forever harping on about supporting culture and creativity, well this is where it's born - in their own back yards. It's certainly not derived from a bunch of bottom feeding creatives, living off the reduced rents of the latest 'creatively themed' subsidised workspaces.

In the early 90's a man much cleverer than I wrote about Bohemian Centre's - places where youth culture is born. Madchester and Happy Valley may be meaningless marketing tags, but they were originally spawned by the very real youth cultures that erupted around specific geographic scenes -cool shops being a part of this. You don't need a shop to start a scene, but it helps by creating a collective shared identity - experienced in real time not through online social networking.