EITHERn Bishop Auckland’s increasingly desolate main street, shops have closed steadily over the years as a retail park has attracted locals. Dozens of storefronts are empty, and the businesses holding on are mostly discount retailers, an odd vape shop, and a few charity shops. Even Poundland is gone. But just a few doors down from where Boots used to be, next to the HSBC branch that closed last August, you can now find yourself on the starting grid of a Formula One race, then hurling yourself down a towering roller coaster.
On average, 47 stores closed every day last year across the UK, nearly 50% more than in 2021, as retailers faced increasing competition from online stores along with rising costs and the damage caused by the pandemic. The future of 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 locations after taking the plunge during the Covid pandemic. Rachel was running a cleaning business when the first shutdown hit. “In one day we lost more than 300 clients,” she says. Kaiyn had been working as a rope access specialist and decided to join her in launching The Gaming Hideaway. “He wasn’t meant to be the beast that he is,” she says. “It was meant to be something old, and we were going to do Sega Mega Drives and Sonic the Hedgehog. and Pac-Man arcade [machines].” But after Rachel did some research on VR, they decided it was a much better fit.
Arcades went into a long decline in the early 2000s as graphics on home consoles improved, but virtual reality has brought them back to the forefront. In addition to offering gaming on VR headsets, as well as PlayStations and Xboxes, The Gaming Hideaway’s VR machines are more like theme park attractions, able to turn players completely upside down as they ride virtual roller coasters or shoot down alien spaceships. Rachel says they recently purchased haptic vests for multiplayer VR gaming in large arenas, so players can feel when they’re hit.
The couple opened their first location in 2021 in Thornaby, near Stockton, and went all-in. Rachel says that her back-up plan was to move into the arcade if the business failed and they ended up losing her family’s home. “The kids were going to have the staff room as their 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.” She didn’t come to that. The launch came just as the lockdowns were ending and people were itching to get out; some 20,000 people visited the Thornaby site in the first year. “When we got to Thornaby town centre, a lot of things were closing,” says Kaiyn. “Now things are opening up again.”
It was a similar story for their Bishop Auckland headquarters in 2022, where they found a city center on life support. The council is now using money from the government’s High Streets Future Fund to encourage the conversion of vacant 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 viewpoint among other projects.
Rachel and Kaiyn say that getting to this point has involved a great deal of hard work. Rachel’s mom and dad helped renovate empty stores and get the stores up and running. “My dad says he’s never worked that much since he retired,” Rachel laughs. They now help run the Bishop Auckland venue, and even Kaiyn and Rachel’s children sometimes pitch in to oversee the VR rides and run the cafe at the venue.
They hope all that hard work will pay off with a growing and sustainable business, but the energy crisis is a setback, as electricity costs rise while consumers have less money to spend. However, it hasn’t deterred them from their expansion plans: they will be expanding their Thornaby hub soon and seeking investment to help open a third location in 2024.
So in the North East, and increasingly across the UK, the high street is reinventing itself. In nearby Stockton-on-Tees, the council has bought the Castlegate shopping center which spans much of the town centre, and is now in the process of demolishing it. In its place there will be a park that reaches down to the river; the local theater has been renovated and reopened, and community-focused projects are being encouraged.
For these areas to thrive, rather than just survive, you need to give residents a reason to go there, says Kaiyn: “To get the right product in the right place, people come to you.”
