All change

Sometime in 1995, I went for a beer with a friend of mine at The Ribble Pilot, and he told me about the Internet and the worldwide web. Suddenly, it seemed that the future - at least the future depicted in the much loved science fiction books of my youth - had arrived. I immediately bought a home PC and 14.4k modem. 

Within a couple of years, I'd started a hobby company doing web work (although it would be a further seven years before that became my full-time job). Back then, there were, for example, no (viable) online databases, and it felt like everyone was finding their way, both in terms of the technology and its application, although we kept a watchful eye on America, which, for a while, always seemed to be a couple of years ahead of us.

It was in the late nineties that a friend of my friend Nick went to some venture capitalists with an idea for an online wine delivery service. Perhaps  somewhat counter-intuitively, many VCs have a conservative streak, and they don't like brand-new ideas. She didn't get the funding, which must have driven her nuts when, just two or three years later, Laithwaites and Virgin Wines moved into that successful market.

It's all changed, of course: at the house in Salford we have 1 Gbps broadband on the square and the days when you had to use your modem to connect to the Internet are long, long gone. Even on a normal day, delivery vans distributing online purchases appear along the road at least hourly. At the moment, a few days before Christmas, they seem to be a constant presence.

This has, over time, had a naturally detrimental effect on the high street, a change that has only been accelerated by the pandemic. The gravy train that has sustained retail landlords in big cities is running out of track and maybe these empty shops and buildings will be converted to help with the long-standing housing crisis.

I wonder what our reduced and revised city and town centres will look like? I can see a place for restaurants and coffee shops, and for clothes shops, perhaps. Maybe small artisan shops, too? God willing, there will still be bookshops although that seems a little optimistic. I wonder, too, whether Bezos' dream will come true and all these delivery vans will be replaced by drones, criss-crossing the skies with our deliveries?

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-14.1 kgs
Reading: 'Troubled Blood' by Robert Galbraith