West High Street: Fill & Download for Free

17-year-old girl held open mosque doors as panicked students ran from a Wisconsin school stabbing.Duaa Ahmad, 17, held the doors of the mosque open for panicked students after an altercation at Oshkosh West High School on Tuesday, Dec. 3,2019. The mosque is located across the street from the school and can only be opened with a pass code for security reasons.100 students from the school ran to the mosque and sought shelter there, thanks to her. She kept the door open until everyone got through before she went in herself. She was very brave.Surveillance video from the mosque shows the moment one of its members, Duaa Ahmad, a high school student at Oshkosh West, jumped into action and entered the security code -- opening the mosque for her peers to safely shelter.'Go, go to the mosque!' Duaa, 17, shouted and asked all students to seek shelter inside the mosque.

Dancing police officers at the Notting Hill carnival.Full English breakfast.British Humour.Cream tea.Police who have no guns.The Queen’s 90th Birthday.Orderly queueing.Fried Mars bar (Scottish).Sunday roast.A stiff upper lip.Welsh Rarebit.Running from a terrorist attack and not spilling your beer, especially at London prices.Cheese rolling race.Highland games.Not quite sure what the speed limit is.We all love a bargain.Diverse High streets.We are fascinated with penises.Maypole dancing.Drinking tea after your house has been bombed.That's all for now.Edit: I know that the cream tea photo is controversial but I put a photo of Padstow in Cornwall in so I had to put a Devonshire cream tea in, I don't want to be accused of West Countryism ;)

I’ve just been reading an excellent (and entertaining, naturally) analysis of the problem from Ian Lang . We have the same sort of thing that he describes in Southampton.The Council built a huge Prestige Shopping Centre, called West Quay (only it’s just been expensively rebranded as WestQuay…), and enticed the local John Lewis and M&S stores into it, leaving their old premises in the main shopping street empty; Primark have taken over the M&S premises, but the old departmental store at the other end of the road has stood empty and derelict for years, until being redeveloped very recently as a new Prestige Arts and Culture Centre. Taking these two major stores out of Above Bar Street, and making it effectively a pedestrianised area massively reduced the footfall of actual pedestrians, by removing their main reason for being there. But never mind, we’d got West Quay instead.They’d already built the Marlands (just round the corner from where West Quay is), a noticeably less Prestigious shopping centre, and the Bargate Shopping Centre, a strange and purposeless place you couldn’t easily walk through (the lower floor was a dead end, both literally and metaphorically, a place where shops went to die), so it wasn’t even a convenient and dry route to anywhere, and with businesses that rarely survived as long as two years (much less on the lower floor). They’ve just demolished it completely, barely 25 years after building it, but as it didn’t contain a single shop that anyone needed to go to anyway, it’s not much missed. We’re getting some archaeology instead, which is always interesting round here, they are revealing a section of the mediaeval city walls that has been almost invisible for years, and then there will be some student accommodation. At the moment, wherever there is a space, there will be more student accommodation; it’s just the same as the way that wherever there was a space, there used to be a new Prestige Shopping Centre. I’ve no idea what there will be when that particular bubble bursts, as it surely will.So we’ve got all these new and largely purposeless shopping centres, and our main shopping street is looking pretty dead. C&A died a death 20 years ago, gradually followed by Woolworths, BhS and HMV; the two cinemas have both long departed to other places outside the city centre; Waterstones bookshop had a major fire last year and seems unlikely to reopen; most of the banks and building societies have closed their high street branches; apart from Boots and Primark, it seems to be mostly just fast food or coffee places and mobile phone shops along there now. I rarely have any reason at all to go there, and I suspect that is true for most people.Well, that’s the problem, here at least, and I’ve no doubt it’s much the same up and down the country. So what do we do about it?Part of the problem is undoubtedly the Council’s War on Cars; it hates them with a passion. But cars are how people go shopping; the days of Mum getting the bus into town to go to the market and all the other major shops, then catching the bus back home again, laden with shopping, disappeared about the time of the Lady Chatterley court case, and the Beatles’ first LP. Unless the government’s plans to abolish cars with internal combustion engines come to pass, and only people who can afford a new electric car every few years have cars at all, then I can’t see that model of shopping coming back.So we can’t take our cars to go shopping in the main shopping street, we don’t like the bus either as a method, and half the time, when we do go there, the shop we intended to go to has already gone, which is one reason why we do a lot of our shopping online. And yet there are lots of things we would like to see and handle, or try on, before we buy them; who wants to buy shoes online, or any clothing where the fit is important? We don’t want to order things online and then keep sending them back. With electrical gadgets and furniture, we want to see what we’re buying, and perhaps choose between several different models, but we want to see them for real, not just on a computer screen.So perhaps the way to go is a model already being used by at least one Well-Known Furniture Chain:Shops as showrooms. No, they haven’t got stocks for you to buy now and stick in the back of the car, or lug home on the bus. But you were half-intending to look at the ones in the shop and then go home and order one from Amazon or on eBay anyway, weren’t you? So here might be an alternative. Smaller shops in the high street where you can come and look, feel, handle, try for size. But they are basically just a shop window! Not much stock to carry, not many staff required, so their overheads are low (the surplus accommodation upstairs could be converted to town-centre flats, and either rented or leased), which makes the business more likely to survive. You come in, you look, you make a decision, you order it - and it will be delivered to you in a day or two.Well, it would have taken that long if you’d bought it online anyway, wouldn’t it? But you hadn’t had the chance to be sure it was the one you really wanted, or would fit you - and this way, you’ll know.You buy your oak sideboard and your sofa like that already, don’t you? Perhaps it’s the way to do much more of your shopping - and the high street could again be full of small shops, and of people.