Mary Portas: Every pound spent is a vote for the world you want

The businesswoman, broadcaster, author, and activist on community, consumerism and why buying less is the most radical choice we have.

I’ve got a house in the Cotswolds, in the Slad Valley, near where Polly Higgins, who began the Stop Ecocide movement, lived. We were great pals. She would roar around on a motorbike and talk about justice with the ease most people talk about the weather. 

Determination like that shapes how I think about the world, and it’s part of why I have hope. The journalist Krista Tippett talks about hope as a muscle. If you don’t use it, it atrophies. If you give space to the noise of greed or the swagger of tech bros, you silence the chance to imagine something better. I refuse to do that. I see more hope for high streets after covid than I saw before.

High streets have never only been about what we buy. They are social infrastructure. They are the web that holds us. A place where you meet someone by chance, ask after their father, find out who needs help, hear news you wouldn’t have found scrolling at home. It gives you the security of knowing there are human beings around you. When I did the High Street Report for the government in 2011, I didn’t ask how to pack in more retail, I asked what shape a high street needs to take so that it works for who we are now.

Covid woke us up. One part of the wake-up was realising that our consumerism is harming the Earth. People felt that deeply. The other was the shock of losing connection. We are wired to gather and when we don’t, life shrinks. That is why I think high streets matter. They are part of our mental and emotional functioning as humans. And every political party noticed. At the last election, all of them talked about regeneration. You would never have seen that 15 years ago.

I was part of the old world. Creative director at Harvey Nichols in the 90s, selling the idea that a £1000 handbag could make your life better. Absolute bollocks. I didn’t know any different then. American artist Barbara Kruger’s piece, I shop therefore I am, was meant as a critique of exactly that world, but I was one of the people feeding it. I look back and think, right, how do we reverse the meaning of that now. How do we shop less and live more?

Young people do not want to be told off. They want to feel modern. 

People think the future is a battle between Vinted and Shein, charity shops and £4 dresses, desire and discipline. It is always going to be messy. There will always be people who want fast fashion and people who want better. It is an education. And you cannot sermonise your way out of this. Young people do not want to be told off. They want to feel modern. Buying second-hand has to feel modern, buying less has to feel modern, and desire needs to be part of the shift.

The fashion press, which once encouraged constant consumption, is already changing its tone. Brands like Who Gives A Crap show exactly what I mean. Take something mundane like loo roll and make it witty, joyful, beautifully designed. That is how you compete with the noise. You tell better stories. People buy into stories.

Every pound spent is a vote for the world you want. If you spend it with a small independent, about 80% goes back into the local economy. That money supports your bins, your street, your green spaces, your neighbours’ wages. Amazon cannot do that for you. So when you walk away from the high street, you walk away from the ecosystem that supports your daily life.

But you can’t romanticise it either. There are hunters and gatherers. Hunters want speed, online; convenience. Fair enough. I don’t want to schlep out for washing powder either. Gatherers want discovery. That is the joy of a brilliant pop-up or a reinvented market. We need both. What matters is giving people reasons to step outside.

Community ownership is part of that future. Labour’s new initiative, Pride of Place gives communities first right to buy empty shops, which is revolutionary. Most people don’t know it exists. That is down to poor communication from the government. Communities want power over their own places. When they get it, success rates soar. I want to shout about this because it is real, tangible structural change.

I also think creativity must return to the high street. We have allowed blandness to take over. The smallest hardware store often has more character than entire shopping centres. Think about the smell of turpentine, the ladders spilling out onto the pavement, the sense that real life is happening. We lost the belief that ordinary people can shape the places they live in. Yet change rarely comes from central government. It comes from people who say this is my place and I am going to shape it.

The American-Canadian journalist and author, Jane Jacobs wrote about this in the 60s. She saw how male-led town planning ignored all the daily interactions that hold a community together. The little exchanges that look trivial on paper but form the scaffolding of a decent life. Her thinking is still urgent. You can feel it in towns where people have refused to become homogenous. 

People underestimate what meaning feels like. When you give people power over their place, they find purpose.

I’ve thought about where this drive in me comes from. Losing my mother young probably shaped me. I was 16, cooking for the family, relying on small shopkeepers who looked out for me. That early experience of care stayed somewhere in me, then got buried under a very bougie career. But Mary Queen of Shops changed something. I saw family businesses fighting to stay alive. I saw how much heart went into it. And that programme changed me even more.

When I walked into that Save the Children shop with staff whose average age was about 80, I saw a completely different energy – pure giving. People volunteered not for status but for connection. They came in to feel useful. They gave their time because it made sense of their day. I watched them go through bin bags of donated clothes with care. And at the end of the makeover, when we stood together with cheap prosecco and they beamed with pride, something cracked in me. That was community. That was the society I wanted.

I couldn’t leave it alone after that. I went to Save the Children and said give me some of your worst shops and let me make them beautiful. Not fancy, just dignified. A place with love in it, and it worked. People wanted to be part of something good. Celebrities came to donate clothes. Volunteers felt valued. It showed me that the bland, exhausted model of retail was not inevitable.

Everywhere I went I saw the fallout of consumerism. Closed shutters. Kids hunched over broken phones. Places stripped of life. And then I started to read – philosophers, economists, historians. I realised how blind I’d been. David Foster Wallace tells that story about the two young fish swimming along when an older fish nods at them and says Morning boys, how’s the water and the young ones swim on before one turns to the other and says What the hell is water. That was me. Swimming in a system so all-encompassing I didn’t even know I was in it. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

That is when I wrote Work Like A Woman. I wanted to raise my son in a different world. I wanted to understand how the workplace had absorbed this patriarchal, alpha culture where care and creativity were treated as weaknesses. I wanted to show you could build a business on joy and purpose. You didn’t have to squeeze people to make money.

Women have been cut out of power for centuries. Now that energy is rising again. 

I keep coming back to this idea of the Divine Feminine. The ancient stories about the bird of humanity flying on one wing, the masculine wing, while the feminine is kept weak. You see the imbalance everywhere – in politics, in tech, in religion. The rise of the Divine Feminine isn’t about women replacing men, it is about both wings working. Creativity, intuition, care, community, imagination. These are not soft extras; they are what keep societies alive.

Women have been cut out of power for centuries. Now that energy is rising again. You can feel it in business, in activism, in communities. My next book will be something about that. The power of women and the power of place. Small clusters of people who decide to make change and then radiate it outward. 

I look at brands that broke the old systems. MAC Makeup launching with drag queens instead of perfect glossy models. RuPaul as the face of a global beauty brand. That was rebellion. That was brilliance. We need that same spirit now. Not tearing down for the sake of it. Building new systems that actually reflect who we are. Systems that include imagination. Systems that include care.

It is all connected – high streets, creativity, community, women, power, hope. All part of the same shift, and once you wake up to it, you can’t go back.

This conversation took place on 28 November and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow. 

Mary's book I Shop, Therefore I Am is available now.

One more thing

Our partner Stop Ecocide is global movement to establish ecocide (the mass destruction of nature) as a fifth international crime, alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Find out more by clicking on the logo below.