On Bishop Auckland’s increasingly desolate high street, shops have steadily closed over the years as a retail park has lured local people away. Dozens of shopfronts lie empty, and the businesses that cling on are mostly discount retailers, the odd vape shop and a few charity shops. Even Poundland has gone. But a few doors down from where Boots used to be, next to the HSBC branch that closed last August, you can now find yourself at the starting grid of a Formula One race, then hurled down a towering rollercoaster.
On average, 47 shops shut down every day last year across the UK – up nearly 50% on 2021 – as retailers faced ever-increasing competition from online stores along with rising costs and damage from the pandemic. The future for these streets is not retail but entertainment, and The Gaming Hideaway in Bishop Auckland, a virtual reality arcade, is a prime example.
Husband and wife team Kaiyn and Rachel Crooks now run two venues after taking the plunge during the Covid pandemic. Rachel had been running a cleaning business when the first lockdown hit. “In one day we lost more than 300 customers,” she says. Kaiyn had been working as a rope-access specialist, and decided to join her in launching The Gaming Hideaway. “It wasn’t meant to be the beast that it is,” he says. “It was meant to be a vintage thing, and we were going to do Sega Mega Drives and have Sonic the Hedgehog and Pac-Man arcade [machines].” But after Rachel did some research into VR, they decided it was a much better fit.
Arcades entered a long decline in the early 2000s as the graphics on home consoles improved, but VR has made them cutting-edge again. As well as offering gaming on VR headsets as well as on PlayStations and Xboxes, The Gaming Hideaway’s VR machines are more like theme-park rides, being able to flip players completely upside down as they ride virtual rollercoasters or shoot down alien spaceships. Rachel says that they have recently bought haptic vests for multiplayer VR games in large arenas, so players can feel when they take a hit.
The pair opened their first venue in 2021 in Thornaby, near Stockton, and bet everything on it. Rachel says their backup plan was to move into the arcade itself if the business failed and they ended up losing their family home. “The kids were going to have the staff room as a bedroom, the main floor area was going to be the living room, we were going to have the party room as our bedroom. It was all planned out.” It didn’t come to that. The launch came just as the lockdowns were ending, and people were eager to get out; about 20,000 people visited the Thornaby venue in the first year. “When we came to Thornaby town centre, a lot of things were closing down,” says Kaiyn. “Now things are opening up again.”
It was a similar story for their Bishop Auckland venue in 2022, where they found a town centre on life support. The council is now using money from the government’s Future High Streets Fund to encourage the conversion of empty shops into accommodation, restaurants, bars and leisure facilities, and public and private investment in recent years has led to the opening of two new art galleries and a viewing tower among other projects.
Rachel and Kaiyn say that getting to this point has involved a huge amount of hard work. Rachel’s mum and dad helped to renovate the empty shops and get the venues up and running. “My dad says he’s never worked so much since he’s retired,” laughs Rachel. They now help to run the Bishop Auckland venue, and even Kaiyn and Rachel’s children sometimes pitch in to supervise VR games and run the on-site cafe.
They are hoping that all that hard work will pay off with a sustainable, ever-developing business, but the energy crisis is a setback, as electricity costs increase while consumers have less money to spend. It hasn’t put them off their expansion plans, though – they are soon extending their Thornaby centre and looking for investment to help open a third venue in 2024.
In the north-east, then – and increasingly across the UK – the high street is being reimagined. In nearby Stockton-on-Tees, the council has bought the Castlegate shopping centre that spreads over much of the town centre, and is now in the process of razing it to the ground. In its place will be a park that runs right down to the river; the local theatre has been refurbished and reopened, and community-focused projects are being encouraged.
If these areas are to thrive, rather than merely survive, you need to give residents a reason to go there, says Kaiyn: “For the right product in the right place, people come to you.”
