Bedford's E-commerce Crock of Gold

Bedford is a historic market town dating back to the 12th century, its prime location on the banks of the River Ouse making it an ideal magnet for retail trade. Bedfordshire is a rural community with an economy traditionally based around farming. No matter how deeply recessions hit, people always need to eat, and so Bedford has remained relatively immune to economic downturns, including of course, the current credit crunch.

In fact, Bedford is booming at the moment, with a £150 million re-vamp of the bus station and surrounding areas, and a huge growth in online businesses, with the recent development of the state of the art i-Lab and Pilgrim Business Centre, home to many internet businesses and online entrepreneurs.

Bedford typifies the nationwide retail transition from High Street to Town Centre to Out of Town Shopping to Online Shopping. 40 years ago, Bedford had a bustling High Street, with many household names proudly lining this distinctive concourse. The early 1970s saw the advent of large shopping centres across the country, and Bedford was quick off the mark, with the Harpur Centre opening its doors for business in 1974. Bedfordians have always associated WH Smith and Boots as neighbours, with the two stores moving from adjacent prime sites on the High Street to adjacent prominent locations in the Harpur Centre, sites which they still occupy today.

Bedford’s town centre is characterised by “big shops”, indicative of the affluence of farming communities and of the relatively cheap land. Many of Bedford’s large retail stores are used as much as thoroughfares as retail outlets. Most locals use British Home Stores or Woolworths as a convenient cut through from the Post Office to the Town Centre, and when the Harpur Centre first opened, the beautifully architected spiral centre tended to be ignored in favour of the huge staircase in WH Smith and a sneaky browse through the album chart section on the way through.

Woolworths now stands empty, as does MFI’s huge warehouse on the edge of the town, nationwide victims of the credit crunch.

MFI was one of the earliest examples of edge of town warehouses, and Bedford was also a pioneer of the out of town superstore that shoppers are so familiar with today. In the 1970s, Sainsburys experimented with a flagship superstore in neighbouring Kempston. In those days, Kempston was still a village, albeit the 2nd largest village in the world! Back then, Sainsbury’s ran a free bus service following the major local bus routes, gathering shoppers from all over Bedford and bringing them to the Superstore, then dropping them home again later.

The 1980s and 1990s saw the advent of the retail park, large areas of out of town real estate with ample parking and even bigger shops. A whole new community of businesses grew up around the MFI warehouse to the north of the town in Norse Road, and more recently The Interchange Retail Park.

With the new millennium came shops accessible to even greater numbers of customers. More and more businesses are creating online divisions of their businesses to meet the growing demands of the armchair shopper. In 2008 £10.9 billion was spent online in the UK, and experts predict that this will rise to £28.1 billion by 2011, almost 9% of the nation’s total retail sales.

Promoting your business online is the first step towards e-commerce. The internet is the best employee any business can have, working for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A website can cost the same as an advert in the local paper, but whilst this week’s advert is next week’s chip paper, the internet can go on working for you for years to come. Is Bedford still at the cutting edge of retail in the computer age?

Of course! We’re not giving up the pioneering spirit that made us the retail capital of the South East. Bedford-based businesses embrace the electronic revolution. Everywhere you go in Bedford, you see shops, vans, and advertisements plastered with website addresses. Bring it on!