Just over a year ago I met a charming woman who wanted to pick my brains about the TV show she was producing. Mary Queen of the High Street aired for the first time this evening, following the author of the Portas Review on her quest to inject...

Travelling through the west country in 1720, Daniel Defoe was struck by the prosperity of the town of Totnes in Devon. He described how salmon would be trapped at the town's mill on the river Dart, and driven into a net by a dog, enabling the fisherman to...

First there was Peppa Pig. Then there was Santa. Both were held up to ridicule in the pages of the Independent and elsewhere as ludicrous examples of waste and stupidity.

What Peppa and Santa had in common, apart from their excited following of small children, was...

Where will you find a policeman being given an affordable home among the community he serves? Or a housing association boss a tenant can have a chat with in the street?

Since 1992, several hundred homes in a corner of west London have been the standard-bearers of a remarkable experiment...

A child learning geography in the 1960s would quickly associate a map of Britain with the stuff that was produced in different places.

Here were the coal towns, in places like Barnsley, Easington in Durham or the south Wales Valleys. Here were the places that made steel, like Sheffield and...

The January hangover, apparently, is already here on our high streets. At a time when, traditionally, the sales are in full swing, retailers are already adjusting their mindsets to disappointment.

Latest figures from the British Retail Consortium show retail sales values up 0.3% year on year, below the...

Lou Reed famously sang that there was only one good use for a small town. When you grow up in a small town you 'grow down' - 'you hate it and you know you'll have to leave'.

But something interesting is happening in many of our small towns: something that...

Next week Trenton Oldfield, the campaigner who disrupted this year's Oxford and Cambridge boat race, will be sentenced for causing a public nuisance. This catch-all common law charge allows the courts to impose any sentence up to life imprisonment.

The original charge was under section five...

Town planners, it seems, are the people everyone loves to hate. When was the last time you heard someone spontaneously eulogise their local planning department?

It's time to put in a good word for these oft-maligned bureaucrats. This week I was at the London Assembly, where I'd been asked to...

As a kid I remember the excitement of the moon landings. They created a sense that everything was possible: that new worlds were waiting to be discovered, and we could be part of them.

The death of Neil Armstrong on Saturday brought back those memories. Technology was great,...

When she was too frail to cross the road on her own, a neighbour used to take my aunt to the corner shop on her estate in Rotherham. There she'd sit for an hour or two and chat to friends and neighbours as they popped in for newspapers or groceries.

At the beginning of this week I got to go to the Royal Horticultural Society's flower show at Hampton Court. For a newbie like me itwas an eye-opener: enough cut-glass accents to make me think I'd stepped into a BBC studio from the 1950s, designer gardens that were...

As any team competing in the Euro 2012 championships knows, having the right support behind you can make all the difference. But sometimes supporters can be a liability: they make headlines for all the wrong reasons.

The town teams that have emerged from the Portas Review of the...

So the 'golden tickets' have been awarded to a dozen successful Portas Pilots to revitalise their high streets, with the promise of another 15 to come. Meanwhile more than 350 towns and suburbs who were hoping to win this mini-lottery will need to decide what to do with...

Imagine you're about to move to a sizeable town or city anywhere in the UK. What would you expect to find in a good place to live? Good jobs and schools, obviously. You'd want to be able to get around easily so you'd look for an efficient public transport and...

The other day I was talking to the head of a successful housing association. He'd been a chief executive for many years, starting out as one of the wave of young innovators who were going to change the world back in the late 1960s and early seventies.

'When I started...

Suddenly there are pots of money to transform high streets all over the place. The government has announced its long-awaited response to the Portas Review, and you can't accuse them of sitting on their thumbs.

There will be £10 million split between 100 towns for...

It's like your front room, but with pigeons and no chance of fighting over the remote. Welcome to the new world of telly-dominated public spaces.

Big screens have been popping up all over the UK recently. With the sound off, they're rather like those screens you see while you're queuing...

The death of a community is a cost not easily counted. Shirley, a pensioner from the village of Trelewis in South Wales, told me last week of the day in the early 1990s when the Coal Board finally cleared the pit machinery at the Deep Navigation colliery.

"The...

You can imagine how people reacted. The idea of 'events in the gents' doesn't really bear thinking about.

Yet the anarchic enthusiasm of a bunch of people in Hackney to bring their local high street back to life says something about the way people care about their communities - even...