High Street Casualties: Ellie Harrison’s Zombie Walk

A performance / event in collaboration with Ort Gallery staged on Birmingham’s busy shopping streets. Dressed as “zombie employees”, more than 60 participants helped to map the former locations of thirteen of the big retail chains which have disappeared from our high streets since the start of the financial crisis in 2008.
Project website

On Saturday 11 April 2015, High Street Casualties: Ellie Harrison’s Zombie Walk was staged on Birmingham’s busy shopping streets.

Dressed as ‘zombie employees’, more than 60 participants helped to map the former locations of thirteen of the big retail chains which have disappeared from our high streets since the start of the financial crisis in 2008: MK One, Woolworths, MFI, Land of Leather, Borders, Habitat, La Senza, Barratts, Past Times, Julian Graves, JJB Sports, Blockbuster & Phones 4U.

Following the event, a special exhibition at Ort Gallery documented both the aftermath and the ‘making of’ High Street Casualties and featured the première of the short film about the project by Tamás Kiss (above) and photography by Marcin Sz and Marta Sobilo.

High Street Casualties: Ellie Harrison’s Zombie Walk forms part of a series of works, including The History of Financial Crises, The History of Revolution: Ellie Harrison’s Fireworks Display and Vending Machine, for which Harrison uses deliberately playful and provocative tactics to analyse and visualise the all important economic and political data which might otherwise go unnoticed.

High Street Casualties is curated by Josephine Reichert with production assistance by Coral Amber Catullo and Katie Stafford.

Zombie Employees: Emiel Aarten, Debbie Aldous, Samantha Aplin, Isabella Aplin, Tristan Aplin, Trudie Bagwell, Joseph Baker, James Barakat, Phil Burrows, Coral Amber Catullo, Elaine Christie, Oli Coxon, Gemma Deeks, Marieanne Delaney, Stefan Dijkstra, Maddo Doughty, Ellie Harrison, Phillip Hennessey, Niels Hofsteenge, Shelley Hughes, Melis İç Ten, Pawel Jaksa, Ruud Janse, Gomi Kelford, Daan Kuyper, Jessica Lawrence, Jordan Lee, Aileen Ludwig, Rachel Mayfield, Sharon Miles, Simon Morral, Merlina Mullings, Balint Musci, Peter Norris, Andrew Nosko, Wesley Oerlemans, Honorata Omelanczuk, David Rees-Jones, Josephine Reichert, Jen Richardson, Louis Robinson, Oscar Robinson Piñero, Pablo Robinson Piñero, Daniel Rull-Levene, Marta Sobilo, Jacob Sobilo, Michael Sobilo, Marcin Sz, Ben Taylor, Lisanne van Dijk, Eline van Gurp, Martin Villau, Destiny Walton-Brown, Jennifer Wilkins and Justin Winfield.

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Ellie Harrison Louise Haigh and Labour say that they will reform the complex fares system to ensure that passengers are confident that they are getting the best fare; confidence that X is the case, and X being the case are not necessarily the same thing. Simplification of fares would have to include the abolition of many fares. The assertion that simplifying the fares structure would reduce travelling costs is based upon a false premise, that being that the complicated-ness of the fares-and-ticketing structure is the reason why fares are expensive, that is not why they are expensive. They are expensive because the base level is too high. If you massively simplify the fares, one might then always be certain of getting the best available fare because there are no obscure cheaper fare hidden away in a Byzantine monolith, but that best fare is likely the best of a bad bunch. Railway fares are complicated, but it is within this myriad complexity that the nuances which facilitate cheaper options lurk; if you take a sledgehammer to the behemoth you bring down the cheaper options which lurk within the behemoth. If there are presently 18 options for doing Thing X, with 15 of those ways being cheap, and 3 of those ways being expensive, if you abolish the 15 cheap options for doing thing X you have massively simplified the paying-to-do-Thing X process because having 3 ways is much simpler than having 18 ways, and you have made it such that one is highly unlikely to not notice the cheapest of the available fares, because one is more likely to notice something when it is one amongst 3 than if it is one amongst 18, but it is nevertheless the case that the person is selecting the cheapest of the 3 most expensive. (i) Being guaranteed to always get the best fare; and (ii). getting cheaper fares are not necessarily the same thing. Be mindful of the actual specific wording of things: both before and after coming into government, Labour has never in actually promised cheaper fares, what Labour has promised is that one will be guaranteed to get the best available fare. The general public, politicians and public-transport campaign organisations alike have been seduced by the word 'simplification'. Simplification is not a virtue in and of itself. Simplification is a neutral concept, neither a good thing nor a bad thing; what is pertinent and important is the nature of the simplification. One can simplify travelling costs upwards. Simplification can simplify out the cheaper options. I deliberately say 'travelling costs', not 'fares', because thinking only terms of fares when it comes to simplification of railway fares and ticketing, and when it comes to Single-Leg Pricing is a proverbial red herring, one should think both in terms of fares AND in terms of travelling costs. Fare decreases do not necessarily mean travelling-cost. LNER is a prime example: with the June of 2023 introduction of Single-Leg Pricing on LNER, and the February of 2024 introduced of the Simpler Fares pilot, travelling costs for using LNER have gone up. Two halved-in-price Singles are more expensive than one Day Return; a fare reduction, but a travelling-cost increase. The changes December of 2023 fares-and-ticketing changes on c2c have many of the same fare-decreases-but-travelling-cost increases as LNER, plus its pay-as-you-go tap-in-tap-out integration with Transport for London (to simplify things) has necessitated the introduction of a weekday early-evening peak period between 4.00 p.m. and 7.00 p.m., which has numerous knock-on effects which can hugely increase one's travelling costs. The answer is not reform of the fares-and-ticketing structure. The answer is not simplification of the fares-and-ticketing structure. The answer is to decrease the price of all existing fares. Do not abolish any existing fares. Do not introduce any new types of fare. Just make all existing fares 45% cheaper, and leave it at that.

As the idiom goes: 'Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true'. Reform will only be good if it is good reform. We don't need reform, we need good reform. Some might fear that prices would inevitably be rationalised upwards. Inevitably, the rationalisation would rationalise out the cheaper options. Some might fear that reform of the fares-and-ticketing structure would, inevitably, reform travelling costs upwards, and reform out the cheaper options. Some might fear that simplification of the fares-and-ticketing structure would, inevitably, simplify travelling costs upwards, and simplify out the cheaper options. Just take a look at LNER. Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true.