This is an opinion piece. It reflects the views of the author, not an institutional position of London Loves Commerce.
Walk down almost any London high street that people actually describe fondly, and the businesses doing the describing tend to be the same kind: a particular café, a specific independent bookshop, a shop that’s been run by the same family for years. Walk down a high street people describe as characterless, and it’s usually dominated by the same handful of chains you’d find in any other town in the country. The market that decides which of these two outcomes a given street ends up with isn’t neutral, and I think it’s worth being honest about how badly it’s currently tilted against the businesses everyone actually says they want more of.
The market rewards the wrong thing
Commercial rents get set, overwhelmingly, by whoever can pay the most for a given unit — which is a reasonable way to allocate scarce space in the abstract, but a genuinely bad way to end up with the kind of neighbourhood most people say they actually want to live near. A national chain with deep pockets and a standardised format can usually outbid an independent business offering something genuinely distinctive, not because the chain adds more to the street, but because it can absorb a higher rent across a much larger balance sheet. The evidence on what shoppers actually prefer doesn’t match what the rent-setting process actually optimises for, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence worth shrugging off.
“The market decides” isn’t a neutral, natural outcome
There’s a comfortable assumption that whatever the property market produces reflects genuine demand working itself out efficiently. I don’t buy that framing as fully as it’s often presented. Landlord incentives, business rates structured around rateable value rather than actual footfall or community value, and lease terms generally favouring larger, more creditworthy tenants over independents — none of that is a neutral backdrop. It’s a specific set of rules that happens to systematically favour scale over character, and treating the result as simply “what the market wants” lets everyone off the hook for a set of choices that could genuinely be made differently.
I don’t think landlords are villains in this story
I want to be fair to landlords here too, because it would be easy to write this as a simple story of greedy property owners versus everyone else, and I don’t think that’s accurate or useful. Most landlords are responding rationally to the incentives they actually face — a system that rewards maximising rent per unit with comparatively little cost for the character it strips out of a street in the process. The problem I’m describing is structural, not a matter of individual landlords behaving badly, which is exactly why I think the fix has to be structural too, rather than simply appealing to individual landlords to behave more altruistically against their own immediate financial interest.
This isn’t an argument against chains existing at all
I want to be clear about what I’m not arguing. Chains aren’t inherently bad, and plenty of them provide real value — convenience, consistency, jobs. The problem isn’t that chains exist on London’s high streets; it’s that the current structure gives them a systematic advantage in every location, with nothing meaningfully correcting for it, so that even streets and neighbourhoods that would clearly benefit from a more varied, independent-heavy mix rarely end up with one purely through market forces left alone.
What actually correcting for this could look like
I don’t think this requires banning chains or artificially propping up failing independents that genuinely aren’t serving their customers well. It requires landlords and local authorities being willing to deliberately curate a tenant mix rather than defaulting to the highest bidder every time — lower rents or more flexible terms for businesses that add genuine distinctiveness to a street, business rate structures that don’t punish smaller, character-led operators as heavily as they currently do, and planning policy that takes a street’s overall character into account rather than treating each unit as an isolated commercial decision.
Why this matters beyond nostalgia
I don’t think this argument rests on sentiment for its own sake. The evidence on shopping district success suggests distinctive, independent-heavy areas draw more visitors and hold their value better over time than generic ones — which means correcting the current bias isn’t really a trade-off between character and commercial success. A high street with genuine identity tends to outperform a generic one commercially too, over a long enough horizon, even if the short-term rent a landlord can extract from a chain looks better on paper.
Residents have more influence over this than they might assume
I’d also push back gently on the idea that this is purely a matter for landlords, local authorities, and policy to resolve on residents’ behalf. Communities that organise, engage seriously with local planning processes, and make clear to councillors and landlords alike what kind of high street they actually want do sometimes shift outcomes, even within a structurally biased system. It’s a slower, less guaranteed lever than policy reform, but it’s one ordinary residents genuinely have some access to, rather than waiting entirely on landlords or legislators to act first.
Making room deliberately
London won’t keep the neighbourhoods people actually love by leaving the current rent-setting and planning structure entirely on autopilot and hoping character survives anyway. It needs landlords, local authorities, and policy to deliberately make room for the businesses that give a street its identity — not as a charitable concession to nostalgia, but as a genuinely sound long-term bet on what actually makes a London neighbourhood worth visiting in the first place.
