With, as you will see, very little editing, here are some fragments from my notebook from when I was travelling over the summer. Here are some thoughts from Fargo, North Dakota. Maybe more to follow.
Fargo has tremendous character. It makes me wonder about how English English gets all tied up about what makes a city a city. Thinking of the German I’m learning, I can only think of ‘stadt’; they just have the one word. In American English, everywhere seems to be a city. Or at least everywhere where the number of people outnumbers the number of animals.
Fargo doesn’t seem to have any chains. Those accusations of anywhere-land which I teach about at IB cannot be leveled at a place like Fargo. Like Montpelier in Vermont, this is a town, sorry, city which is bouncing with vitality. Plenty of identity. Very few boarded up shops. Independent cafes, bookstores, bars and breweries. The bookstore seemed to be the last holdout for an old mall.
America seems to have a different relationship with malls to the UK. Malls seem to be still be doing well. I think the automobile and all the mobility and independence which it represents is etched differently, perhaps more deeply, on the American psyche. Why would you not want to drive up to your shop, your bank, your pharmacy, your launderette? There are the super malls, which seem to only be competed with by Dubai. Then there are the strip malls. These are a fairly recognizable cousin of the UK retail park. Not a full on mall, but a collection of stores which exercise some kind of mutual dependency and normally have a food outlet or two thrown in. The big malls are truly places of shopping worship. I think in the US, like in the UK, many small and medium size malls are struggling. Online shopping has screwed them over.
The big malls, I guess like some of the bigger out of town shopping centers in the UK, survive only as destinations rather than purely as geographical locations for retail activity. As big chains reduce their physical footprint, some of the smaller malls have been overrun with random stores, save for having empty units. I think UK town centres have responded better than US downtowns on average. I think places like Fargo or Montpelier are more of an exception of the rule in the US, than good town centres in the UK. I think in part that is because the UK has lagged behind the US and has therefore been able to avoid some mistakes or at least learn from problems and respond to them more pro-actively.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of main streets and high streets which are struggling to reinvent themselves in 2025. I guess in smaller urban areas in the UK, the transition to malls was never complete, especially where there wasn’t a big city nearby to offer a shopping destination. So in many British towns there was something clinging on in the centre which has been added to or at least built around. Many chains had a clear preference for high street or retail park: Dixons on the high street, Curry’s at the retail park. Bringing in food and drink offers, other leisure activities, providing different spaces for new types of retail, such as artisanal and other independent businesses, could compliment and revitalize what was left behind.
Now, if anything, it is the big out of town shopping centres which are struggling as they offer nothing unique. There is no identity or character to pull people away from the online alternative. Whereas the high street now compliments the chain offerings still there with increasing food and drink offerings, normally not just chains, plus small local businesses which would never be found in the shopping centres or retail parks. Save from dreadful transport or parking, town centres perhaps have the upper hand now in the UK. In the US, there seem to be clear demarcations between what the downtown is for, why you go to a strip mall and what you’ll find at the mall. The thriving downtowns are full of idiosyncrasies which provide identity and a USP. Strip malls could be anywhere but they’re founded on the principle of convenience. The malls are destinations which provide a curated and sanitized offer: no surprises, reliable and the parking is normally easy.
Interesting fact that Fargo and Moorehead, which are twin cities on the North Dakota/Minnesota border, lie in Red River Valley. About 50% of the population are of Scandinavian origin. Walking around this is quite apparent: there are so many blonde and red headed people. There is a real sense of migration and heritage here, not least a centre based around a Viking ship constructed in the 1970s and sailed to Norway. Another positive migration story.
It’s funny how the US has a history of positive migration stories, yet now migration is seen as almost exclusively a negative story. Maybe the Vikings help to convey this point: if you lived in Europe when the Vikings were at large, they were probably not a good news story. Nobody wanted the raping and pillaging. Maybe some people were happy with the trading. Perhaps it became easier with the Christian conversion. Now though, so many aspects of Viking history and culture are positive. So many places peopled by the Vikings. So many aspects of Nordic and Scandinavian culture heralding back to the Vikings. People trace their ancestry back to the Vikings. Stories can be retold and re-heard.
The coming of European settlers to so many parts of the world, not least the Americas, was far from universally positive. Now, we look at migration probably more negatively than perhaps at any previous point in human history. Yet, at no point in human history have so many places stood to benefit as much from migration as a result of their demographics.
All that Viking pillaging, the voyages of Columbus, the Oregon trail, etc. – those episodes of history all led to immensely damaging migration which, on balance, rightly or wrongly, is seen as a positive thing, or at least accepted as a thing neither positive nor negative. None of the destinations of those migrations actually had a demographic need for extra people though. Now, so many parts of the world are in a state of natural decrease. Migration is an obvious solution, if not completely free of problems. Yet migration is decried.
I enjoy visiting new places but my problem is I keep finding places that I really enjoy and think that I’d like to go back. In as while I was in Fargo that I was hit by that sense of realization that, for so many places you have the chance to visit, you only really have time to visit there once. It goes back to the familiar idea of the opportunity cost: revisiting a place means you’re forgoing using that window when you could have gone to somewhere new.
Places, experiences, breweries, beers – have to be viewed in a similar way as Oliver Burkeman distinguishes between the to read pile and the river of content flowing past. You can’t read everything, you can’t visit everywhere, you can’t drink every beer. You first and foremost have to accept that you can only take a sample. Then you just have to take the most judicious sample you can, accepting it will only ever be partial and then not being overly critical of the sampling criteria as there cannot be a right way – there can be a way which works for you, at a certain place and a time, and you can change that criteria and this will guide your sampling. Enjoy and treasure what you are sampling, learning what you can from it, rather than bemoaning what you can’t sample as that was going to be inevitable anyway.
Commonplace 